


there's a starman waiting in the sky

by philthestone



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Human, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, the highschool au no one asked for but was begging to be written
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-22
Updated: 2018-10-09
Packaged: 2019-01-21 14:54:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 29,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12460104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/philthestone/pseuds/philthestone
Summary: Looking back on the first several months of his last year of high school, Peter has got to admit that he never would’ve thought attempting to ask Gamora out on a date would have resulted in lying awkwardly at the bottom of a literal dumpster with his three underage foster siblings, a star football player with a learning disability, one full unopened packet of rainbow Skittles, and Gamora’s perpetually-angry younger sister at two am on a Thursday night.





	1. is there life on mars?

**Author's Note:**

> in my defense guardians of the galaxy is just BEGGING to be high school au'd, specifically an au where yondu is the long suffering foster dad of a bunch of multi-racial special needs kids. thats right folks, peter is The Only White Boy
> 
> all the chapter titles/fic title are from david bowie bc #mood and also i'll put informational notes at the end. 
> 
> reviews will be the fuel that fires my finishing the second chapter of this mammoth fic, which is partially written already so HERE'S HOPING

Looking back on the first several months of his last year of high school, Peter has got to admit that he never would’ve thought attempting to ask Gamora out on a date would have resulted in lying awkwardly at the bottom of a literal dumpster with his three underage foster siblings, a star football player with a learning disability, one full unopened packet of rainbow Skittles, and Gamora’s perpetually-angry younger sister at two am on a Thursday night.

First of all, dumpsters _smell_. Terrible. Awful. It’s like, on the unofficial Shitty Smells Scale of life, the bottom of dumpsters is right up there with Peter’s locker at school and Yondu’s unwashed socks. Except those other two things are entities that Peter only has to occasionally walk past, for _maybe_ a thirty-second interval at most; he’s never had to _lie_ in them.

Secondly, Peter can’t actually recall how, when, or where they got the Skittles, which is an overall bad sign. It either means his working memory has decided to leave him once and for all as some kind of strange coping mechanism against the general weirdness of his life, _or_ Rocket stole it when Peter wasn’t looking, which isn’t _technically_ the worst alternative. But, still. They’re teenagers who are hiding at the bottom of a dumpster past midnight on a school night – except for Groot, who is twelve, but _he’s_ still holding his spray paints from earlier and is almost as tall as Peter himself, which somehow adds at least two multiples of twelve to the “shady teen vandal” vibe they’ve got going. Stolen merchandise is not going to tally any points in their favor. 

He’s not sure if Yondu would be proud of that general aura or flat out ground them all for a month, which brings him to point three: he’s fumbling in his pocket for his phone, because it is _two am on a freakin’ Thursday_ and they are _hiding in a dumpster_ and it would be really nice if they could have a ride home.

The only positive side of this whole situation is that Gamora seems to be holding his hand. Peter has no idea when that became a thing, which brings him back to the unfortunate memory-loss hypothesis. And also really tells you something about the General Situation, because Peter’s pretty sure in literally any other scenario he would have had an actual heart attack and maybe swooned on the spot if she so much as touched his shoulder. 

_Anyways_ – she’s holding his hand in hers and is the only one of them all who is sitting up very slightly in this dumpster of theirs, obviously straining her ears to see if there are still Dangerous Noises coming from outside.

Peter swallows thickly as his hand clamps around the cracked phone case, and he shimmies it out of his pocket – it’s tricky to do that lying down – and brings it up to his face, trying to be as quiet as possible. It’s when he’s finally flicked to Yondu’s contact and has his thumb hovering over it, ready to press down and call, that he comes to the sudden and unfortunate conclusion that Yondu’s definitely going to ground their asses.

It is not a good conclusion. 

Technically, death-by-mobster in the middle of the night is also not a fun option, in the grand scheme of things. Even so, Peter has to take a moment to wonder whether or not it’d be generally less painful to wait things out and take their chances with climbing back into the house through the back upstairs window after whatever bad guys they’ve accidentally run in with leave the dumpster vicinity. Peter’s climbed in through that back window plenty of times in the past, _mostly_ without incident. Of course, there was that time in tenth grade where his shorts got caught on the warped siding of the house and he couldn’t get around the fact that he had to remove his pants to successfully get to his room – or, like, that one time last year when he didn’t want Yondu to know he and Bereet were planning on making out in his room and he’d fallen headfirst into Groot’s tiny vegetable garden halfway up the porch beams. Retrospectively, it’d been foolish to assume that Yondu wouldn’t have figured it out and good-naturedly given him shit about it til the end of time no matter what, but _still_. Yeah, sure, so Yondu knew exactly what went on in his house at all hours of the day without so much as twitching his nose about it. You had to give Peter some credit for _trying_ to be discreet. 

Peter thinks faintly that it’s a good thing his concept of “dignity” is a generally very loose thing.

But regardless – sneaking girls into his room or trying to practice his window-climbing skills because he just saw Indiana Jones and naively wanted to be able to pull off cool stunts are very different from smuggling most of his siblings, the girl he has a crush on, her younger sister, a full pack of rainbow Skittles, and Drax into his room through the window _because they were being chased by the mob_ at two in the morning.

Peter has a feeling Yondu won’t just let this one pass with a knowing raised eyebrow or a week’s worth of cheerful humiliation at the breakfast table.

Which doesn’t mean that he won’t be happy that they’re all safe, or beat them up or anything like that. Hell, no. More than likely he’ll be ready to go out the very next night and shoot the guys who made them hide in the dumpster in the first place with that balls-old shotgun of his, which Peter isn’t sure is a good thing or a bad thing. 

But it _does_ mean that Peter’ll have to explain to him, as the eldest, why in the name of God’s green Earth they were in the vicinity of the mob in the first place, which means explaining why they didn’t just go straight to the police when Gamora came to Peter two weeks ago with tension in her shoulders and a very blunt, to-the-point,

“I think my adoptive father is a criminal.”

Now, this wasn’t as jaw-droppingly disturbing as it _might_ have been. Peter has admittedly more than once been fairly sure that Yondu used to rob banks for a living, or at least one or two convenience stores way back in the day. _He’s_ certainly not the most upstanding of citizens, even if he does currently pay all his taxes and buy them brand-name Honey Nut Cheerios from the grocery store when Rocket begs. Like, he keeps all their money in a big wad of cash under the upstairs mattress, which Peter’s _fairly_ sure isn’t what most parents do, but it’s whatever, right? He’s a pretty okay dad. He tells Groot bedtime stories.

And anyway, Peter’s _actual_ dad was some kind of evil corporate money launderer and also had a bunch of folks killed, including Peter’s mom, so all in all Gamora’s concerns are not the most foreign thing in the world.

But, like, _still._ Usually, when you’re in the twelfth grade, that kind of thing is taken to the school counselor. 

Which Peter will admit was _not_ off the table. It was very much on the table! They didn’t _plan_ to expose the theorized mobsters all on their lonesome. They didn’t _intentionally_ end up in the back of Baskin-Robbins eavesdropping on secret mobster conversation, even if they _did_ , consciously, make the super smart decision of inviting themselves to the house party of one of their more shady, bigoted-y, crazy rich-y classmates for the express purpose of being in hypothesized mobster-meet-up territory.

It’s not that they _wanted_ to single-handedly catch the bad guys, or anything, they just needed _proof_ of _badguy-hood_ before going to the cops. The fact that Ronan’s house was the worst and didn’t have any good windows to sneak out of because it was all open concept, leading to some tragically ungainly sneaking, was not _actually_ their fault. 

All this to say – them, in the dumpster, right now.

Peter grimaces at his phone, and looks over at Gamora, who is still eyeing the lid of the dumpster with a determined frown on her face. His hand is slowly getting sweaty and gross in hers, but he really doesn’t want to let go, because it’s the only thing that’s stopping him from one hundred percent losing his shit and freaking out.

They’re _in a dumpster_. It is _past Groot’s bedtime_.

“This sucks,” whispers Rocket, into the silence. Groot sniffles slightly from his other side, and something in Peter’s stomach flips, because Groot crying is a universally-acknowledged Not Cool Thing. “Whose idea was it to hide in here in the first place?”

“Shhh!” says Nebula, from Rocket’s other side. 

“ _You_ shhh!” says Rocket.

“It was Peter’s idea,” says Drax, in not at all a whisper.

“Hey,” protests Peter, a little bit lamely, as Nebula says “ _Shhhh_!” again, this time with more force.

“He’s right,” whispers Mantis (who also sounds like she’s been crying which is a _double_ Not Cool Thing) from Rocket’s other side. “It was your idea, Peter.”

“There’s something pokin’ into my back,” adds Rocket, sounding grossed out. Which is fair, Peter thinks – they are in a dumpster, after all. There’s a faint shuffling that Peter recognizes as Groot signing something, and Rocket sits up sharply in place; even in the dim lighting, Peter can make out the half of his mop of hair that’s sticking up at odd angles. He wishes they weren’t hiding at the bottom of a dumpster from mobsters so that he could in good conscience make fun of him for it.

“What d’you mean it won’t be fine?” says Rocket. “‘Course it’ll be fine. Right?”

This last part is directed towards Peter, who looks at them mutely, and then back down to his dimming phone screen with the air of one heading to the gallows. Gamora finally stops frowning at the dumpster lid and turns to face him, the pink tips of her hair faintly standing out in the dim blue lighting of the phone. 

And to think all of this started because he wanted to ask Gamora out on a date. Which, for the record, he _still_ hasn’t actually gathered up the courage to do.

“Ugh,” he says, and calls Yondu.

**

It’s a balmy day in early September when Peter looks up from pretending to study for senior algebra to the sight of Gamora chewing on the end of her pen and realizes that he might be a little in love.

Well, okay, maybe not _in love_. In Peter’s experience, which is not actually a whole lot but he watched Romeo and Juliet in the ninth grade and has been listening to Yondu’s not actually objectively terrible advice since the beginning of forever – but in Peter’s experience, teenagers falling in love usually ends badly. His mom, for example, fell in love as a teenager, and that most definitely did not end in a nice way.

Of course, Gamora is not an evil Kurt Russell look-alike several years Peter’s senior, and he’s known her since the eighth grade, and she’s pretty much his best friend. The likelihood of them being on opposite sides of some sort of family blood feud and not already knowing about it is very slim, and, more importantly, he’s _pretty_ sure she’s not involved with mobsters. Or, like, is a mobster herself.

Actually, Gamora’s hardcore enough that Peter thinks she probably _could_ be a hitman or something if she wasn’t also one of the nicest people he knows, so there is that. Also, she has this weird habit of clamming up every time her dad is brought up, so who knows! Secret family blood feuds are also potentially on the table!

The point, though, that Peter is trying to get at here, is that he looks up from his messy algebra notes and Gamora’s sitting there with her pen lid half chewed to pieces and her eyebrows slightly creased as she determinedly makes her way through Mr. Dey’s history homework. Her long colourful hair is up in a ponytail, which means her ears are sticking out just a little bit, and all Peter can think is, _woah,_ in this dumb little internal awe-struck voice that Yondu would probably laugh at and Rocket would definitely mimic obnoxiously til the end of time.

Good thing they’re not in Peter’s head.

But then, this “woah” brings Peter to his next realization, which is that he’s officially graduated from having a loser crush on his best friend to automatically thinking “woah” as he watches her do history homework, and that probably means something important.

“Peter?”

“Hm?” He knocks his knee into the library table in a super suave move and leans to the side, crossing his arms and pretending that never happened.

Gamora gives him a weird look.

“Are you okay?”

“I am great,” says Peter. “Awesome. Good. What’s up?”

“Is there something on my face?” she asks, seriously, putting her chewed-up pen down onto the table. “Because you’ve been looking at me strangely.”

“Uh,” says Peter. “No. Nope. I mean, yes, I think there’s some highlighter on your cheek. You should get that checked out.”

He realizes belatedly that there _is_ in fact a streak of green marker on her usually brown cheekbone and mentally fist-pumps at his own quick thinking. Gamora frowns, but does seem to buy it, reaching up and touching her fingers to her cheek before sighing and turning back to her notes. Peter looks down at his own notes, because he’s supposed to be studying for this quiz they have coming up that he could _probably_ scrape a B+ on if he doesn’t put in any effort but _should_ try to aim for an A because college applications are coming up and Peter had realized at some point in August, for the very first time, that he actually kind of really wanted to go to college.

Which means he should probably at least try for a scholarship, considering they’re not exactly in the school’s wealthiest catchment, even if Yondu had waved a spoon somewhat aggressively in Peter’s face when he’d brought it up the other morning and said, “You wanna go to college, boy, you damn well goin’ to college. Ain’t nothin’ more to it.”

Which had, you know, been nice. Moral and/or financial support, or whatever. Peter figures that this is as good of a parental experience as he’s gonna get, and honestly, he’s pretty okay with that.

But college means high school is over, and Peter realizes, suddenly, with a sinking feeling in his gut as he stares at his messy algebra notes, that not everyone is going to college. Or more specifically, not everyone can only afford to go to the nearest state college, which is for all practical purposes the only place he’s currently headed.

“Hey, Gamora?”

“Mmm?”

“You know how college stuff is coming up?”

Gamora doesn’t look up from her history notes, peering down intently at some footnote on the types of rifles used in the war of whatever-the-heck – Gamora’s favorite part of history is the battle sequences – and arches an elegant eyebrow.

“January sixth. I told you to circle the date in your planner.”

Peter’s planner is definitely already lost to the sands of time and/or Rocket’s science experiments (the last one was a fully operational flame thrower, so like, aar eye pee School Planner), and Gamora definitely knows this. And Peter knows that Gamora knows this.

“Uh, right, yeah,” says Peter. “That. Anyways, do you, uh – know where you’re applying yet?”

This is a casual question, delivered with casual tone and inflection with very casual posture – Peter’s still leaning a bit to the side with his arms crossed – but Gamora’s hand hesitates against her notes. Slowly, her eyes flick up, narrowed.

See, the thing about Gamora – one of many things, but something that Peter has come to appreciate very dearly over the past four or so years of fumbling through the high school scene together – is that she and “beating around the bush” do not go hand in hand. Gamora tells things as they are, and usually does so with minimal levels of tact. Which means they have a pretty good “regulate Peter’s bullshit levels” system in place, one that _does_ go hand in hand with their “make sure Gamora doesn’t stab Scott Lang with her plastic fork at lunch” system, because Peter allegedly has the ability to talk the skin off a cat.

At least, that’s what his mom used to tell him, way back at the tender age of nine years. Peter has the feeling that sort of thing only improves with time, like fine wine. That’s what wine’s supposed to do, right?

The point is, Gamora beats around bushes a grand total of not at all, which is why Peter is really not surprised, but rather just lamely resigned, when she says,

“You’ve never planned ahead for anything in all the years I’ve known you.”

“That’s not true,” Peter says. This is also done in an objectively lame fashion. “I planned ahead for that science project in grade nine where the volcano made farting noises.”

Gamora looks unimpressed. Peter clears his throat, loudly, taps his feet against the floor and then very smoothly picks up his entire math binder and holds it up in front of his face. She can’t question his muddled motives if he’s _studying_ , now, can she.

He counts an approximate ten mississippi’s in his head before he slowly lowers the binder down just enough to see over the top. 

Gamora has her arms crossed, and she somehow is looking even _more_ unimpressed than before.

“Um,” says Peter.

“Peter,” says Gamora.

“It’s – it’s not a big deal or anything, I just wanted to – you know. Like. It’s our last year, or whatever.” He huffs, and looks back down on his notes, like this isn’t a really big and life-altering thing that’s just come and lodged itself in his chest. 

“Or whatever,” Gamora repeats, in a softer voice. “Right.”

“Anyways,” says Peter, and tries to figure out what _x_ means.

“My f – my father wants me to look into some of the Ivy Leagues,” says Gamora after a moment, her voice quiet. Peter finally lowers his binder the whole way down and nods, once, twice, three times, and now the nodding is getting weird but he doesn’t seem to be able to stop.

“Right,” he says. “Makes sense.”

“Yeah,” says Gamora. She doesn’t look too happy about it – there’s a telling crease between her eyebrows – but it is what it is, Peter supposes. 

“Yeah,” he repeats. “That’s – that’s cool. You’ll probably get in.”

“Probably,” she echoes, her frown growing.

Peter clears his throat and looks down at his algebra. He’s not sure he likes the feeling in his chest, but he has absolutely no idea what to do with it at all, so obviously his next move is to very smoothly and subtly change the subject. 

“So math, huh? It’s really something.”

Gamora is still frowning, but she purses her lips and gives him an awkward little smile before nodding in agreement and moving her books so that she can sit beside him and they can kick the math’s butt together, as a team.

Peter keeps looking at the streak of green on her cheek, wondering what the hell he’s going to do.

**

“I’m gonna ask Gamora out on a date,” Peter announces to the world.

Or, at least, to Rocket, Groot, Mantis, Drax, and the old family kids’ wagon, which is not actually a wagon but an old, probably-stolen shopping cart that was at some point painted orange and named Alyssa.

“That is a great plan!” says Mantis immediately, clapping her hands.

“That’s a terrible plan,” says Rocket, looking up from his lap, which is holding something that looks like a deconstructed toy batmobile that now has a lot of electrical wiring running through it.

“I thought you were already dating,” says Drax, frowning.

Groot picks a dandelion from the ground and puts it in his mouth.

“No eating the weeds!” Peter yelps, tripping forward and gently prying a disappointed Groot’s fingers from his mouth. “C’mon, bud, we’ve been over this – and _no_ , Drax, where the hell did you get that idea?”

“You acted like you were,” says Drax obviously, shrugging his shoulders. 

“We –” starts Peter, taking his hands away from Groot, who promptly puts the dandelion back in his mouth. “Wait – Groot – Yondu! Groot’s eatin’ the weeds again!”

“WHAT KIND!” hollers Yondu from the kitchen inside, where he is making pancakes on this very fine Saturday morning because yesterday Rocket had cheerfully declared him “world’s okayest dad” and he had to live up to that title Peter guesses, voice floating out through the open front door to reach their porch pow-wow.

“What d’you mean _what kind,_ he’s – God, come _on_ , man!”

Groot smiles at him serenely.

“This is a terrible idea,” Rocket says again, finally putting down the techno-batmobile and hopping down from his perch on the end railing of Alyssa. “I’m tellin’ you right now.”

“It’s not a terrible idea!” says Peter, defensive, crossing his arms. “What’s so bad about it!”

“Remember the _last_ time you tried to ask her out on a date?” asks Rocket seriously, leveling the batmobile at him in a stern sort of way, which actually somehow works despite the fact that at fourteen, the top of Rocket’s curly head barely comes up to the middle of Peter’s chest. 

“That does not count,” says Peter, trying to widen his eyes in a threatening fashion. He thinks with a sinking feeling that it probably just makes him look a bit deranged. 

“What happened the last time?” asks Drax curiously, leaning over to look at Rocket.

“No –”

“Star-idiot over here asked her out on a dare in their freshman year and she almost challenged him to armed combat with a butter knife.”

Mantis bursts out laughing; Drax looks delighted at the prospect of violence; Groot puts the dandelion back in his mouth.

“First of all, you weren’t even _there_ , you can’t tell the story accurately –”

“Can too!”

“No, you –”

“Just ‘cause _you_ don’t learn from past mistakes –”

“I do too learn!” says Peter, voice steadily rising in octave.

Groot spreads his hands out and wiggles his fingers.

“ _Thank_ you, Groot. See? Groot gets it!”

There is a dandelion petal sticking to the twelve-year-old’s bottom lip, which Peter ignores.

“I’m just sayin’,” says Rocket, putting his hands on his hips. “This is a bad idea.”

“Shut up, Rocket,” says Peter, as decisively as he can. “Can we get back to the important things, here? Like, me asking her out _now_?”

“Do you think she will threaten you with a butter knife again?” asks Mantis in a concerned voice, somehow one hundred percent genuine.

“No –”

“Maybe she will ask him to lift a heavy object to prove his strength,” says Drax, whose idea of a good time is body-slamming into people on a football field. 

“Come on, guys –”

“Or she’ll just say no,” says Rocket innocently.

Peter glares at him, trying his utmost to convey how _uncool_ they’re all being with just his eyes. 

To be fair, he hadn’t exactly expected any transformative revelations to emerge from the impromptu team meeting he’d called this morning, after listening to his mom’s old tapes all of last night and waking up to face the peeling Knight Rider poster in his bedroom with the sudden realization that normal people ask other people out on dates when they think they might be a little bit in love.

Or, in not-love. Whatever’s safe for teenagers to partake in without death being involved.

Most of the time, their team meetings aren’t _total_ disasters, and happen on the jungle jim in the park two blocks away. It’s close enough to the main street for Gamora, Nebula and Drax to be able to bike there without issue, but secluded enough (it’s a pretty shitty park, all in all) for them to feel like it’s their own little corner of the universe. The middle of nowhere, kinda – at least, that’s how it _feels_ , if only because of the empty beer cans littering the sandbox and and the general “no one ever comes to this park, not even shady people doing drugs” vibes. 

It’s great. They have had some _great_ times on that jungle jim. Rocket calls it their tree house, even though nothing about it remotely looks like any trees, but the idea makes Groot really happy so they’ve all been playing along for years and it’d feel strange calling it anything else.

Yondu’s front porch has a markedly different feel from the Tree House of Nowhere Park, which might be why their hastily-called team meeting is not being treated with the appropriate gravitas. Then again, Gamora isn’t here, very much by design, and usually she’s the one that gets everyone to shut up and listen when things get _really_ rowdy, so there is that. Peter’s not quite sure.

“Well,” says Peter now, trying his very utmost to be chill about this. “Can’t know what she’s gonna say ‘til I _ask_ her, can I.”

“I mean,” says Rocket. “You can _guess_.”

“Rocket is right,” says Mantis, smiling widely.

Really, Peter thinks, he’s going to disown all of his siblings one of these days, just _on principle_. 

“Rocket is not usually right,” says Drax, “but on this, I agree.”

“Oh, my _God_ ,” says Peter. “ _How_ are you all so unhelpful!”

“Hey, Pete,” says a new, familiar voice, whose owner is casually leaning up against the porch railing and looking at him in a vaguely sympathetic fashion. “Rough mornin’, huh?”

Peter turns away from Kraglin and lets his forehead _thump_ gently against the doorframe.

“Gotcha,” says Kraglin. “Hey, Yondu around?”

“He is inside making pancakes,” says Mantis, sounding excited at the very prospect, which might say something about their collective existence, because the last time Yondu made pancakes it took everyone five minutes to chew one bite. Which was fine – they had cereal in the pantry – until the foster care lady came the next day for an impromptu visit and Groot kept trying to offer her the leftover pancake discs. Then again, he’s actually pulled out a recipe this morning from some obscure orifice of the house with every intention of using it, so who knows, Peter thinks – they could be moving in the right direction, pancake-wise. And he _does_ make a mean plate of scrambled eggs.

Kraglin salutes in thanks and ambles into the house, whistling off-tune, in that uniquely lanky way of his that in Peter’s opinion makes him look perpetually chill or perpetually stoned. He’s never sure which, specifically, is the truth, but Kraglin’s pretty cool. He, too, has been around since the beginning of forever, and when Peter was ten he taught him how to ride a motorcycle.

Which Yondu promptly expressly forbade him from ever doing, sure, but it was the sentiment that counted. And anyway, he learned how to drive stick a couple months later from Yondu himself, so it all worked out in the end.

The point is, Kraglin’s presence in their lives has been about as steady as the auto-repair shop Yondu’s owned since before Peter came to live with him, or the collection of funky doo-dads lining the windowsill above the kitchen sink, or the fact that one of the walls in their house is randomly and without explanation painted an eye-killing, electric blue. Him showing up without much fanfair at ten am on a Saturday morning to steal their food and talk shop with Yondu is not anything at all out of the ordinary, which is maybe why Peter has the terrible idea of opening up his big mouth and asking him for advice.

“Hey – Kraglin, wait!”

Kraglin turns around two steps into the doorway, eyebrows raised expectantly. Peter takes a very brief, fleeting moment to wonder at the fact that he is about to ask for dating advice from a guy with a neck tattoo.

“What’s up, Pete?”

“Uh,” says Peter, “um, so I was. Thinking. I mean –” There’s nothing more for it – “ _IwannaaskGamoraout_ and, do’you, uh, have some pointers, maybe?”

This last part is said with a strain to his voice and another smooth and suave lean against the wall, which is not actually that smooth or that suave because Peter misjudges the distance away and nearly falls over sideways.

Rocket snickers behind him; Peter pointedly ignores this.

“Oh hey,” says Kraglin, grinning easily. “Wasn’t she the girlie who challenged you with the butter knife in yer freshman year?”

Peter, to the sounds of Rocket’s riotous laughter from behind him, groans.

**

So his entire family is utterly useless. That’s fine! Peter can deal with that.

He’s totally seen enough TV shows to know how to ask a girl out on a _date_. It’s not like he’s never, like, _liked_ a girl before.

He’s liked loads of people. He has experience necking in cars! He may be a clueless dumbass sometimes, but he’s clued _in_ enough to know that he can probably get away with saying, “Hey, let’s go grab some ice cream together or something and maybe hang out downtown, because I like you a lot.”

It’s not, objectively, that huge of a deal. And hell – they’ve been out for ice cream _lots_ of times. 

In retrospect, that is exactly the problem.

“So,” says Peter, tapping his fingers erratically against the steering wheel. “The plan – pick up Groot from school, drop _you_ off at soccer practice, grab orange juice on the way home. I’m gonna forget that last one,” he adds, addressing the car at large, “so one of you should probably remind me so Yondu doesn’t make me feel responsible for Groot’s sad eyes.”

“But you would be responsible,” points out Nebula from the back seat of the ancient, half-broken-down, orange and blue Land Rover. She’s frowning, which is not an unusual occurrence in itself. “As it’d be you who forgot the juice.”

“That’s not the point, guys,” says Peter, making a face.

“She’s right,” says Gamora, who as usual has claimed shotgun. 

“Don’t agree with me,” snaps Nebula, “we’re still fighting.”

Gamora offers the windshield an eye-roll that is somehow even more exaggerated than the ones she usually saves for Peter and tightens her grip on her backpack, which is sitting in her lap. From the back, Rocket says,

“Can we get fruit roll-ups too?”

“No,” says Peter.

“What! C’mon, please?”

“No.”

“Pleaaaaase.”

“No, man, I only have three dollars!”

“ _No, man, I only have three dollars_ ,” Rocket mimics in a nasal voice. Peter, in a great display of maturity, ignores him. “Can we get slushies?”

“From the grocery store?”

“From Tulk’s mom’s mini-mart, idiot!”

“That place is hardly sanitary,” snaps Nebula, crossing her arms more tightly across her chest such that the joints in her prosthetic squeak a little. “You might die.”

“Oh, gee, I didn’t know you cared so much,” says Rocket. The sarcasm in his voice is rapidly approaching Peter’s Getting A Headache On Principle threshold.

“I didn’t say it was a bad thing.”

“Hey!”

Across the stick shift and parking brake, Peter gives Gamora a slightly desperate look. Rocket and Nebula have started bickering in earnest now, debating the pros and cons of possible death versus Tulk’s mom’s admittedly great-tasting slushies.

“So, uh, anyway,” says Peter.

“I’ll make sure to remind you about the orange juice before you drop me off,” Gamora offers, because she’s the best ever. Which forcefully and terrifyingly reminds him of his new goal in life, which is to successfully get words out of his mouth and ask her out on a date. Peter makes a funny squeaking sound involuntarily.

Gamora gives him a weird look.

“Are you okay?”

“Great,” says Peter, hoping that his voice sounds more chill to her ears than it does to his. “Anyways, uh – so like, I was thinking. What if after soccer practice we – we went and, um, grabbed some ice cream.”

Gamora smiles softly, the little gentle one that she’ll do sometimes when they’re all getting along. Peter feels something backflip in his chest and hates the fact that his hand is getting sweaty on the steering wheel.

“We have a test in two days, don’t forget that.”

“Yeah,” says Peter, “but we’ve got time to work on that – it’s just ice cream, right? A, uh, couple hours tops? We could –”

“Ice cream?”

 _Oh, no_.

“Dude, you deny me roll-ups but you wanna go get ice cream?”

“Not – not _now_ –” splutters Peter hastily, fingers curling around the steering wheel tightly. “ _Later_ , obviously –”

“Are we going to Martinex’s? Can we get the double bubblegum?”

“Woah, hey –”

“I’ll only come if I don’t have to talk to Gamora.”

“You’re not –”

“If we go before Groot’s bedtime,” says Gamora, still smiling, “then we’ll still have time to quiz each other on algebra before Nebula and I have to be home.”

This is it, thinks Peter. This is what it feels like to watch the world go up in flames.

“Yeah,” he says weakly. “Yeah, uh, sure. Good plan.”

He makes the terrible mistake of glancing into the rear-view mirror; Rocket is grinning at him. Peter wonders if he could mime shaving all of Rocket’s hair off when he’s sleeping into the mirror without Gamora or Nebula noticing.

“So,” says Rocket, “is that still a no to the slushies?”

**

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away – 

“You mean last year in the school cafeteria,” Gamora had said seriously, the first time Peter sat Mantis down to tell her the tale of how they all became friends. Mantis had only started living with them two months before, after Peter finally found out the truth about how major of a dick his biological dad was. Her move had signaled the end of what Peter had rightfully taken to calling “the year of the Devil”, with all the appropriate intonation and solemnity. 

Mantis wore giant black-framed spectacles with really thick lenses that Drax cheerfully declared made her look a bit like a bug, and didn’t know how to smile like a normal human person for the first three weeks that she lived with them. She was a little weird, but then, Peter figured, so were _they_ , more so than her probably. And anyway, being stuck with the asshole whose genetics Peter was reluctantly carrying for your whole childhood was probably enough to screw anyone up. Peter had decided it was only right to integrate her into the group as their official new foster sibling with all appropriate gravitas, which naturally meant telling the tale of how they all became friends in the first place. 

_So_ – a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away ( _whatever_ , Gamora), on the third week of the first month of the eighth grade, Peter found himself stopping an indignant Drax from pushing and equally indignant Gamora into the school’s newly-installed and already-stained recycling bins.

Drax insisted that Gamora had tripped his eighth grade girlfriend (a very serious relationship, as all eighth grade relationships are) _on purpose_ during soccer practice, and as such deserved a shove into the garbage cans. Gamora kept yelling that she had done no such thing, and it’s not _her_ fault that her father kept encouraging her to play dirty from the stands. 

Peter, out of the goodness of his heart, was trying to explain that no one should be shoving anyone into garbage cans, and could they instead talk it out over some bartered goldfish crackers, maybe?

Of course, this line of thought was from a far more naive and foolish time in Peter’s life, when he still underestimated the ability of his now-friends to favor violence over normal people things. Drax had hollered, “She-demon!”, pointing an accusatory finger, and Gamora had, in a righteous bought of thirteen year old fury, yelled, “I _hate_ my father!” into the clamour of the cafeteria, and then promptly tried to shove Peter’s outstretched placating arm out of the way so that she could explain her father-hating stance to Drax _properly_. 

It wasn’t anyone’s fault in particular that somebody’s tuna sandwich went flying across the room. _Really_ , it wasn’t. 

It _was_ , however, specifically Rocket’s annoying ten-year-old voice that had hollered “FOOD FIGHT” into the suspended second of silence that followed.

Some experiences are just made to forge long-lasting, irritating, occasionally really weird friendships, Peter told Mantis. There’s something undeniably unifying about teaming up to sneak out of a two-hour detention sentence and grab slushies from Tulk’s mom’s mini-mart with the spare change in your pockets.

“That wasn’t what really made us friends,” Gamora had said easily, not looking up from her English homework. “It was later on that month, when we sprayed Ronan with that purple goo from the dollar store.”

“Oh, yeah,” Peter had said, leaning back, reminiscing. “Man, that was _good_. We didn’t even get caught.”

“Dick,” Rocket had added succinctly, from where he was sat on the couch playing video games with Groot.

All this to say, of course, that Peter loves his friends. Friends like these are ridiculously hard to come by. But sneaking out of detentions together and combined childhood baggage can also bring about a _slight_ layer of co-dependence, which means that they end up doing almost everything together, which puts a real cramp on Peter’s senior year social life.

Okay, not just senior year, his social life in general. 

Okay, so he doesn’t exactly _have_ a social life, apart from hanging out with his siblings and Gamora and Drax in an abandoned playground. 

Actually, the last time he had anything close to resembling a date was the very beginning of last year, when Peter in a bout of somewhat-justifiable teenage rebellion stole Yondu’s car keys and ended up sort-of-skillfully making out with Bereet from biology class in the backseat until he had the really smart idea of knocking his elbow into the car’s horn and interrupting a local drug deal that just so happened to be taking off behind them. 

It didn’t help that Yondu called him ten minutes after they escaped being shot at – _God_ , their neighborhood is shit, Peter thinks – and chewed him out over the phone whilst Bereet awkwardly twiddled her thumbs in the passenger seat.

The point being: Peter’s social life, which may have once had half a leg, is currently six feet underground.

“I need your advice,” says Peter, dropping into the miraculously empty seat in front of Drax in the cafeteria, dumping his half-finished lunch with him onto the greasy table. They have fifteen minutes until their next period starts, and Peter hopes that his words don’t come out sounding as agonized as he feels, right now, in this moment. Drax looks up from his half-eaten sandwich, frowning.

“About life in general,” he asks, “or some specific dilemma?”

“Well –”

“I have many things to say about life in its general form,” continues Drax, still holding his sandwich, “but I am in the middle of eating this very good sandwich. And I have nothing to say about specifics that I do not know about.”

“Dude,” says Peter, who is years past any confusion over Drax’s overly-formal weird-for-a-teenager speech patterns and really truly in a bind, here. “Just – look. You’re the – I can _not_ believe I’m saying this, but – you’re the only one of us with a steady girlfriend –”

“We have been together since the eighth grade,” says Drax proudly, and Peter figures that since that’s actually a pretty damn good accomplishment, he’ll let him have that –

“Right, exactly,” says Peter. “So – so I was – y’know, wondering – how’d – when you asked her … like … _out_ –”

“You are attempting to plan romantic advances towards Gamora,” says Drax, nodding and taking another big bite of his sandwich. Peter would wince, expect that he sort of _did_ announce his plans to the world, so what did he expect, really. “Which will very likely end in failure, as she is far less pathetic than you.”

Drax says this last bit with his mouth full, which in no way at all lessens the, once again, objectively lame feeling of all the air deflating out of Peter’s chest.

“Seriously, dude,” says Peter weakly, slumping against the cafeteria table.

“That’s why you came to me,” adds Drax, almost unnecessarily. He nods again, like he’s pleased that Peter thought he was a valuable source of advice – which, by the way, _why_ did Peter think that, this is _Drax_ and also the last time he asked a girl out was in the _eighth grade_ – and finally puts his sandwich down. “I am a very wise person, and your friend.”

“Sure,” says Peter, because – okay, yeah, that’s true, sort of. _Sort of_ , because as much as Peter loves the big guy, he’s in a _situation_ here, okay. There’s a lot at stake. Not his dignity, because Peter’s no longer sure he has any claim to that word, but, you know – _friendship_. Comradery. Compadre-ness. The ability to pass twelfth grade English, which is only really happening right now because Gamora proofreads his essays.

What if he totally blows at asking her out and things get so _awkward_ that she never proofreads his essays ever again? 

_Seriously_ intense things are at stake here!

“You should find something you are both interested in,” says Drax, interrupting Peter’s silent internal spiralling. (The word _silent_ being metaphorical, because Peter’s pretty sure he’s making a faint sort of drawn-out whining noise.) Peter blinks, hand hovering over his half-empty potato chip bag, and the spiral of doom lessens marginally.

“Huh,” says Peter. “That’s … actually not a half-bad idea.”

“For example,” continues Drax, taking another big bite, “you enjoy dancing. Gamora does not. That’s not something you are both interested in.”

Right, thinks Peter. Right. Yeah. Great. 

Sounds about right. 

The thing is, Peter thinks – he’s been doing a lot of thinking lately – the _thing_ is, he thinks, walking absently down the hallway towards math class and tossing a spare eraser up and down, he’s sure they must have _something_ in common. At _least_ one thing, okay, or clearly, they wouldn’t have been friends for so long.

Right?

Unless of course he’s misjudged this entire situation and Gamora isn’t actually his best friend and secretly hates him but only tolerates his presence because –

“Hey.”

“Hey!” Peter is adding voice cracks to the list of things he’s going to disown, right after he regains his balance after nearly toppling over into the passing locker from shock. She _really_ needs to teach him how to silently appear at people’s elbows like a super spy ninja, sometime. He clears his throat, so hard he nearly starts coughing, and tries again. “I mean – hey. _Hey_.”

“Hi,” Gamora repeats, looking bemused. She tucks a stray bit of hair behind her ear and Peter forgets every conversation they have ever had ever, including but not limited to any regarding potential shared interests. Do they _ever_ talk? He’s not completely sure he knows her last name, let alone her _interests_ – “Did I startle you?”

“Nope,” says Peter, “Nah, naw, _no_ – I mean. I was just. Deep in thought. About this algebra quiz, you know.”

“I find that unlikely,” says Gamora, but there’s a smile on her lips. Peter scoffs, and crosses his arms over his chest, nearly bumping into a panicked-looking freshman who’s scurrying past them on his way to class. 

“Uh, I happen to be a _champion_ at thinking about algebra. And quizzes. And dancing, that is also a skill that I excel at, and, y’know, I can make a mean peanut butter sandwich –”

“Because your mother used to make them with you,” Gamora finishes for him easily, slipping into an exchange they’ve had many times before and somehow not thrown off by Peter’s inane rambling, taking him by the elbow and leading him down the crowded hall. People _part_ when Gamora walks through hallways, Peter knows from experience, and he’s not sure if it’s because Yondu says she actually possesses a solid whop of personal dignity or because she’s just really tall and has great biceps and a resting bitch face only slightly less scary than her little sister’s. “You’ve also got a great sense of humility.”

But she turns her head and shoots him a smile, and so Peter’s, “Hey,” comes out more half-hearted than obnoxious.

And, also – she _knows_ that about him. That he can make good peanut butter sandwiches, because of his mom. And it’s weird, really weird, but Gamora’s colourful ponytail swings and Peter realizes that even if they don’t talk – which they _do_ , obviously, what kind of moron is he – she knows that he always picks the dandelions out of the grass when they sit outside during lunch because his Pops used to do it when he was a kid, and _he_ knows that she twists the ring on her pinky when she’s nervous because it’s something she’d see her mother do when she was really young, one of the few faint memories she has of her. 

It’s _weird_ , because all of a suddenly, Peter’s spiral of doom hulas into a drunken sort of half-twirl and he stops walking, tugging Gamora back with his elbow.

“Hey – hey.”

“We’re going to be late for class,” she says, turning back to face him, once again looking bemused. “What is it?”

“So – I was, thinking, not just about algebra – well actually that wasn’t a full lie, I _was_ thinking about algebra, and about how we’re gonna kick this quiz’s ass so in _celebration_ , maybe we could,” _come on, Quill_ , “uh – watch a movie tonight. You know. Celebrate.”

He waves his hands vaguely, for emphasis. The hallway is swiftly emptying, straggling students either loitering in the hall like that’s their God-given purpose in life or scrambling to make it to class before the more hard-assed teachers close their doors for good. Gamora tilts her head, and almost – _almost_ frowns. But her hand’s still on his elbow.

Peter would like to say that his earlier epiphany infused him with an unshakeable courage that now leaves him very calm and confident, a suave Casanova akin to Han Solo, but in reality he’s kind of holding his breath and trying not to pass out. The breath-holding is probably smart, though, he thinks vaguely; the hallway smells like old socks and Axe deodorant, most of the time.

And then Gamora says, “What movie?”

“I dunno,” says Peter, shrugging, the breath whooshing back into his lungs. “Somethin’ – something we’ve already seen, maybe like a classic so we could just hang out and blow off steam through, like as – I mean. Like _Back to the Future_ or something, I know Yondu’s got an old tape of it _somewhere_ in the –”

“I do not think,” says Gamora, interrupting his rambling as smoothly as she ever does, now actually frowning a little, “that I’ve ever seen _Back to the Future_.”

And that’s it, really. Peter’s grand plans for casual date night, and potential teen romance movie plot declaration of feelings with accompanying making out on his bed (wait, no, his bed is gross – Mantis’s bed, maybe) evaporate into the old-socks-and-Axe smell of the hallway.

“How would one _return_ to the future?” asks Gamora of his silence, looking genuinely curious. 

“Oh, my God,” says Peter, “you _what_.”

“Have they experienced the future _before_ –”

“You _haven’t_ – none of them!”

“There’s more than one?”

“OH MY GOD, _GAMORA_.”

**

They do great on their algebra quiz, or whatever. 

More _importantly_ , Peter completes a missing part of Gamora’s life by making her sit down (in the living room, and not on anyone’s bed) to watch all three films back to back. 

Some things are infinitely more important than anything so dumb as _love_ , okay. 

After Gamora’s left, smiling despite running the risk of barely scraping by her curfew, Peter makes his way into the kitchen, still bouncing a little from the adrenaline high of introducing someone you care about a stupid amount to a movie you care about a stupid amount.

Yondu’s sitting at the table, his booted feet up against one of the worn chairs because he has no sense of hygiene, arms crossed.

“What,” says Peter, feeling strangely defensive in a way that only Yondu’s silence can make you feel. It’s an art, Peter thinks. A shitty, annoying art, but an art nonetheless.

“I didn’t say nothin’,” says Yondu. Groot’s already asleep, curled up in his room where he shares a bunk with Rocket, but Rocket’s up in the living room fiddling with Legos, and Mantis is curled up in the threadbare second-hand armchair across from him, immersed in the copy of _Twenty One Ways to Peel Ginger Root_ that Nebula lent her earlier that week. Peter’s still pretty sure the title of the book is somehow a euphemism for how to commit murder, because no one in their right mind would write that much about _peeling ginger_ , but he hasn’t been able to prove it yet because Mantis takes the damn thing with her to sleep at night. The house is almost obnoxiously quiet, compared to its usual chaos, and Peter pauses to internally grumble at how he can no longer do his history homework in the car on the way to school because he can _drive_ or whatever. “She make it home on time then?”

“Dunno, she hasn’t texted yet,” says Peter. And again, “Dude, _what_.”

Yondu only smiles, slow and gnarly-toothed and strangely _knowing_ , which is the worst, and then he makes Peter do the dishes before turning in, which is _even more_ the worst.

He’ll just ask Gamora out some other day, Peter tells himself as he half-asses scrubbing day-old no-brand Nutella off his own dirty plate that he forgot to bring down to the sink. There’s still plenty time left before graduation, right?

**

In November, Rocket gets suspended for a week because he accidentally-on-purpose blew up the water fountain in the hall, and Peter has to stay late after school every day to pick up his homework.

In December, Yondu half-guilts, half-asks Peter nicely to come help at the auto shop in his spare time, because business is doing well and he’s too cheap to hire an extra guy and Peter needs to develop _practical skills_ before college, like he didn’t spend half of primary school digging fallen tools out of cracks in car hoods, probably in violation of most child-protection laws. 

In January, Groot and Mantis come down with the flu, _hard_ , and Peter is trapped between babysitting and studying for finals.

In February, _Peter_ comes down with the flu, and life sucks.

“Here,” says Gamora, dropping a stack of notes onto the scratched, greasy maple wood of their kitchen table and giving him a sympathetic look. She’s wearing nothing over her tanktop but her thin black windbreaker, because Gamora does this weird thing where she can’t feel the cold even in the middle of winter, and her long hair is windswept, falling messily over her shoulders. Peter blames his fever and the fact that his head hasn’t stopped pounding for two days for the way that he has to blink a few times, dazed, before he can get past the butterflies in his stomach and formulate thoughts coherent enough to respond with.

“Thanks,” he says, his voice hoarse. And then coughs into his cup of lukewarm orange juice that Yondu claims tastes like piss. It _does_ , but his throat isn’t accepting anything cold right now and all he could find in the fridge was the no-brand orange juice that Yondu’d come back from the shop carrying, almost like he cared.

Gamora wrinkles her nose. “Bad, huh.”

“I swear it’s somethin’ not from around here,” says Peter. “Like an outer space disease that ain’t for people. I can’t move my arms.”

“I’m sure your arms will live,” says Gamora, but her lips are pursed in that way that means she feels bad for him. She looks tired, Peter suddenly realizes, his brain taking a second longer than usual to pick up on it. Gamora is hard to read on good days, and uniquely skilled at hiding her own weaknesses, which Peter has never quite figured out. But right now, with his head working on half a cylinder and his nose completely plugged, it takes him twice as long to realize that she’s blinking weird and standing with slightly less perfect posture than usual.

“Hey,” he manages, half-slurred around his orange juice piss. “You okay?”

He’s looking, now, and he sees the half a frown before her face smooths out. 

“Far better than you,” she says, a graceful non-answer. “Just – busy catching up after college applications.” Peter hopes that his pitifully ill state will be enough on its own to get her to spill – he _is_ sitting slumped over in the kitchen in an old greying t-shirt that probably used to belong to Yondu and his rattiest pair of boxers, with knit socks on his feet and a kitchen towel wrapped around his neck like a scarf – because the stupid orange juice is useless and his throat really hurts too much to talk again. Clearly it is, because Gamora looks away at the lone soggy orange juice carton on the table’s edge and says,

“And – Nebula’s being difficult.” Like a confession. She bites her bottom lip, and frowns, and picks at an imaginary hole in the hem of her jacket. “It’s – not important. Our father’s just –” She shakes her head, and shrugs, and offers a weird half-smile, half-grimace. “He’s – strict. You know.”

“Sure,” says Peter, slurring the word, only vaguely knowing. “Are you sure you’re –”

“And I guess I miss you,” she blurts, once again looking down at the table, and if Peter’s cognitive function wasn’t dialed way down right then he would have picked up on the shift in her posture and the faint flush on her brown cheeks. “At school. I mean – yeah. Get better soon.” And then she reaches over and punches him in the shoulder, much more lightly than usual, but fever’s the _worst_ so Peter nearly cries anyway.

“I miss you too,” he chokes, wishing that the kitchen floor would swallow him and his broken sinuses right up so that it wouldn’t look like missing Gamora was making him cry flu tears into his watered down orange juice drink. Except instead of sigh at him or roll her eyes, which is usual Gamora fair, she leans over in an oddly jerky movement and hugs him so that his rat’s nest of curls presses into the soft material of her shirt. 

Peter’s orange juice nearly drops right out of his shaky hands. 

She pulls back, tucking her hair behind her ears, and says,

“I should go – my dad, you know, he said I should be home by –”

“Right,” says Peter, or at least he _thinks_ he says something like that, because he’s once again in a weird sort of hallucinogenic daze that he’s like to blame on the orange juice and the flu but is really attributable to other, bigger, potentially lamer and more feelings-y things. Then Gamora’s gone, and there’s a stack of history notes keeping Peter company with their neatly-written block letter black and white content. Gamora doesn’t believe in colour-coding, he knows.

“So,” says Yondu’s voice, causing Peter to jump violently, spill half his juice, and start another set of flu-induced waterworks.

“ _Shit_ ,” croaks Peter. “Don’t _do_ that, man.”

Yondu drops his car keys onto the middle of the table, carrying the chill of outside with him into the kitchen, clearly just home from the shop. He’s whistling as he crosses the kitchen to rummage through one of the cupboards, still wearing his long leather duster and boots. He ignores Peter’s protestations and drops into the seat across from Peter before slides a musty looking bottle across the table, along with a chipped mug, and then puts his booted feet up on the table’s edge like he’s been doing since Peter was nine years old.

“Put that orange piss away and drink some of this ‘fore you keel over,” says Yondu, picking at one of his gold teeth with his pinky finger. 

Peter squints at the bottle and pokes it. “Whassit?”

“Cold med’cine,” says Yondu, grinning. He whistles again, this time with his typical wheezy laugh at the end of it, and shakes his head. “Shit, boy, I ain’t see you put up this bad since you was still up to my elbows. Wha’was it last time? All them lil’ red dots you kept itchin’.”

“Chicken pox,” mutters Peter, deigning only to pout sullenly before unscrewing the bottle with fumbling, achy fingers and pouring himself some of the syrupy brown liquid from Yondu’s mysterious cold bottle and nearly choking on his first sip. “Wh- _ckhg_ – G _od, Jesus_.”

“Watch yer mouth, boy,” says Yondu. 

“What _is_ that?!” splutters Peter, eyes watering for the third stupid time this past half-hour, and possibly the tenth stupid time this whole day. Frickin’ flu.

“Whiskey,” says Yondu. “An’ some honey’n shit. Yer almost eighteen, i’s good for ye. Now, more ‘port’ntly, when’re you gonna grow a pair and tell that girl how you feel.”

Peter chokes on his whiskey again; he can feel it burning through his nose, and he spares half a second to resign himself to the enduring wetness on his cheeks before gasping harshly and spluttering.

Yondu looks unimpressed.

“Spend all these years breakin’ my back raisin’ y’all an’ you can’t even keep down a finger of Jack. Figures.”

“This is rat poison,” Peter manages, throat aching, and then, “what the _hell_ , Yondu.”

Yondu only grins, which only makes things worse, somehow.

“Who – how’d you figure it out?” Peter demands, as much as a person can demand when sitting in the middle of the kitchen with a towel-scarf around their neck. Somehow, the thought that he’s being anything less that completely discreet about his stupid feelings is making him feel vaguely ill, so when Yondu’s grin only widens, Peter swallows, hard, and then winces because his throat feels like sandpaper.

“I known you since you was a skinny lil’ good-for-nothin’, boy. You think I don’t know everythin’ that goes on in this house? ‘Sides, you always did have a damn’s worth for a poker face, Pete.”

Peter glares; Yondu shrugs.

“Rocket tol’ me months ago.”

“Sonuva –”

“Hey now.”

“No,” says Peter. “Nope. Nuh-uh. We are not havin’ this conversation here. Now. Or ever. Anywhere, at all, in the world –”

Yondu sniffs, in that way he does when he really is unimpressed, and for some reason it makes Peter’s shoulders tense and his cheeks burn, because this is such a dumb mundane kid-parent thing to do and that kind of stuff still makes Peter’s chest ache, which is annoying.

As far as foster dads go, Yondu’s not objectively the worst there is, Peter knows now. He may be a huge pain in the ass half the time, but he really does care, whether it be making sure Mantis doesn’t have to wear Peter’s hand-me-down t-shirts or enforcing a “no killing each other in the living room” rule or getting Rocket tested for ADHD and then chewing out the rude guidance counselor who gave them shit about it in the first place. And anyway; Peter’s no idiot. Most people don’t – with much grumbling and cantankerousness, yes, but the act was still done – sign adoption papers for a pair of kids they’ve literally pulled out of their auto-shop trash bins, or feed and house the kid of a dead woman they barely know. 

He can be a bit of a bitch about it, but then, Peter figures, _Peter’s_ a bit of a bitch about it too, sometimes, and so are a whole lot of other people who are adults and not seventeen and have only just recently _stopped_ being a bitch about it. So really – really. A lot of stuff that’s happened has sucked real bad, but they’ve made it through it. 

The point being – it’s not like Peter isn’t always secretly delighted when Yondu talks about feelings, because historically, it’s led to like, bonding moments and improvements in general household relationships. But historically, Peter’s talked about his feelings, and Yondu’s talked about _his_ feelings, and there was no overlap. Yondu’s never talked about _Peter’s_ feelings before.

It is categorically not cool, Peter thinks, if only because his cheeks are too pink to blame it on the fever. He really does have an awful poker face, damn it.

“She ain’t gonna wait around forever, you know.”

Which, like, okay, Peter _knows_ this, that was kind of the whole point, but it still punches him right in the chest anyway. 

“I _know_ that – you – God, just –”

“Take yer time,” says Yondu, in a weirdly uncharacteristic display of patience, which somehow makes Peter even more annoyed.

“God, dude, shut up okay! I’m working on it! Why’re you even – you hate feelings!” Peter finally gets out, very little malice in his tone. “Last time – what happened to _sentiment_ being a bad thing!”

“Pete,” says Yondu, crossing his arms.

“And that was about getting into a fight with a frickin’ skinhead at school, so –”

“Shit, boy, I told you to use your damn sense and not go throwing fists at a sonuvabitch with a knife!”

“Well –” says Peter, shaking his head a little bit and pointing his finger at the whiskey bottle, “that’s just – you did, yeah!”

And then he crosses his arms and glares at the remainder of his cold medicine, wondering if he could get away with dumping it into one of Groot’s flower pots and finishing the orange piss instead. It takes a long moment, and then Yondu’s full-bodied, wheezing laugh is filling up the kitchen.

“Whoo-ee,” he says. “You got it bad, boy.”

“Shut _up_ , Yondu.”

“Listen, Pete. Now I reckon I ain’t done most things right, but all this time an’ I figure learned one thing, so I’m only gonna tell you this once an’ you better get it through that fool head’a yours. You ‘member last year?”

Peter’s eyes move from the whiskey bottle to the scratches in the table, and then over to the edge of Gamora’s stack of notes, catching on her neat, blockish handwriting. He swallows, his eyes watering again.

“Yeah.”

Last year was the worst. Most of Peter’s memories involve him being awful to everyone, feeling bad about it, crying, and missing his mom, none of which are very fun things. The Year of the Devil, as he’d said.

“You care about someone, you tell ‘em. Ain’t nothin’ more to it than that.” 

Peter finally looks up, because Yondu’s voice has gone all serious, the way it does when he really means a whole lot more than what he’s saying. And he’s frowning, too, jaw set like he’s uncomfortable, so Peter’s face betrays him and softens, his shoulders loosening. He’s talking about _them_ , the old bastard, and Peter wrinkles his nose and makes a face at the top of Yondu’s bald head and groans.

“Ugh, _fine_ , _dad_.”

Yondu sits back, seemingly satisfied, and starts picking at his teeth again.

“You figure it out you tell me,” Yondu says, a note of his usual shit-eating self back in his voice. “I wanna be there when she kicks your ass.”

“ _Dude_!”

**

So.

Attempt the third, Peter decides, has to be a bit more planned. And probably something that doesn’t involve a tried-and-true group activity, lest everyone else dogpile onto his smooth invitation with a unique brand of collective obtuseness that Peter can’t help but wonder is their curse in life. Classic films are also off the table, lest Gamora’s somewhat stricter upbringing expose her as enduringly unexperienced in high quality media content, because Peter figures he can’t trust himself not to ruin a potentially romantic mood if she doesn’t know who Han Solo is. Which, like, she _does_ , now, because he made them sit and watch _Star Wars_ two weekends in a row, Groot and Mantis and Rocket all sprawled across the living room floor in front of the TV, Nebula and Drax having claimed the cracked old armchairs on either side of the threadbare couch. Amidst the peanut gallery and the sound of laser guns in space, Peter realized that he really shouldn’t have been aiming for Han Solo in terms of smoothness, because the poor guy had no idea how to ask a girl out on a date.

Peter can relate.

But, no – _now_ , he has a plan. He’s just gonna be honest. That’s all it takes; bravery, and stuff, right? If he can stand up to his crap-sack biological parent, or call Yondu out on his awful dad jokes, or get through life without his mom – he can tell Gamora how he feels.

It’s officially March, which means college applications are over and half the senior year is waiting on tenterhooks now, as though students like Gamora aren’t gonna get into all their top choices with ease and panache and all those fancy words that Peter once heard Aleta use the single time Yondu let him tag along to the club a few months ago. It’s really the Peters of the world who are waiting on tenterhooks, because somehow hindsight is not really twenty twenty here, and even though Gamora proofread his essays twice and Yondu _actually_ helped him pick a semi-decent topic, Peter has a sinking feeling none of them were even particularly legible, despite being typed on your standard out-dated laptop. 

But it’s March, and that also means that the new term has just started and the halls are a little bit in chaos, and the weather outside is slowly turning from chilly to a muggy, gross kind of cold that Peter, who spent the first eight years of his life in rural Missouri, claims is still freezing. He hasn’t seen Gamora since she dropped off that stack of notes for him the previous week, and as lame as it sounds, he’s kind of itching to see her face again. He almost forgets to lock the car in his haste to get into the musty old school building, and Rocket tries to throw his lunchbag at Peter’s head in retaliation.

“You’re the biggest loser I know!” Rocket yells at Peter’s back as he tugs his backpack over his shoulders and runs towards the doors, nearly bowling over his harried-looking history teacher in the process.

“Sor – sorry Mr. Dey –” Over his fumbling with his cup of coffee and car keys. “I mean, whatever, shut up Rocket!”

He doesn’t stop to hear Rocket’s response, because he’s only got another five minutes before their first class and Peter has the feeling that if he doesn’t spit it all out now, he’s gonna lose his nerve, _hard_. He can’t see the bright ends of Gamora’s hair by their lockers through the crowd, but he makes a beeline for there anyway, ‘cause she’ll have to show up, right? He can’t remember Gamora missing a day of school in all the years he’s known her, and –

“Oh, thank God,” he mumbles, which in days to come will be the annoying source of face-warming embarrassment every time he remembers his own desperation. 

“Hey,” says Peter, pushing up off the locker, tugging down at the ends of his rumpled plaid shirt. His heart is pounding in his chest, and he wills his hands to remain hanging loosely at his sides like a normal person’s would, hoping that he remembered to put his shirt on the right side out that morning. Her hair’s up in a ponytail again, ears sticking out like usual, and her boots are tracking wetness behind them like she forgot to wipe them on the entrance mats like she usually does. She looks distracted, her hands gripping the straps of her backpack so hard that her knuckles have gone pale – but then, _he’s_ distracted, so it doesn’t fully register at first. “Listen, I –”

“I need to talk to you,” Gamora says in a low, strained voice, locking eyes with him and grabbing his wrist, giving him all of zero time to process this before she drags him roughly through the crowd of students, knocking into one or two people whose names Peter can’t remember, and around the corner by the water fountain that Rocket blew up a couple months ago. She turns him around so that she can look at him again, but she hasn’t stopped holding his wrist, either, which traitorously makes Peter feel oddly more confident in what he wants to ask.

“I need to talk to you too,” says Peter, half a grin on his face, because he’s a moron. “What’re the od –”

“I think my adoptive father is a criminal.”

Peter blinks – once, twice. Gamora’s fingers are almost painfully tight on his wrist, which is great background to any vague attempt at a dumbass smile sliding right off of Peter’s face. For the first time since he’s met her, he is finally realizing, she looks absolutely terrified. 

“Oh,” says Peter. “Oh, _shit_.”


	2. ground control to major tom

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The thing is, even if he had absolutely nothing to do with that one guy’s staged death that was tangentially related to crazy inheritance man, Peter feels weirdly responsible. Not for, like, the _death_ , sure, but for _something_. It’s annoying, because seeing Gamora look freaked out is not only freaking him out, it’s making him want to do dumb things like hold her hand so that she looks _less_ like she’s freaking out, except _that_ takes him back to remembering how he was the world’s worst friend and never realized that something was bothering her until  
>  it was too late and her dad’s some kind of evil person.
> 
> He has experience with evil dads, Peter thinks. He should have seen this _coming_ , maybe even as soon as the ninth grade hair dyeing era.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aaah im still alive!!!!!!!! im still working on this fic!!!!! this is so so late but school has been really insanely busy and writing angsty shippy one shots happened more often than family adventure highschool aus did. also, it looks like this fic is going to be,,,, a lot longer than i thought! r i p 
> 
> shoutout to anyone who manages to catch the really vague tangential thor reference, and as always, all titles are from david bowie. 
> 
> reviews are the best thing in the world! enjoy!!! <3

When Gamora turned fourteen, she dyed the bottom half of her long, dark hair a shocking, brilliant pink colour, an edgy ombre look before edgy ombre looks ever became popular. Two weeks later, Nebula shaved all of _her_ hair right off, and that’s what made Peter think that perhaps hair was the one way the two of them could rebel against their mysteriously overbearing father without getting into too much trouble. At least – the hair dyeing seemed to be an approved thing, and it’s not like anyone could forcibly _regrow_ Nebula’s buzzed head, and Gamora seemed weirdly proud about the whole thing. It’s been varying shades of that same bright pink colour ever since, and the awkward _we’re old enough to do it now_ was short and to the point and somehow still left a big open hole right at the end, where Peter _could_ have seized the opportunity to be obnoxious and nosey and ask, _hey, what’s your dad’s damage, anyway_?

Unfortunately, this historic event occurred back in a time when Peter, naive dumbass that he was, still harboured a lot of resentment in and around the concept of fathers in general, and was generally too caught up in his own teenage rebellion against Yondu and the blissful unawareness of how much of a dick his _real_ dad was to be able to pull himself out of his own head long enough to poke around more. He was also fourteen, and fourteen year old boys are not known for their wisdom and perception, Rocket being an excellent case study. And, more importantly, Gamora was even less forthcoming and even more defensive than she is now, and, looking back, Peter thinks that if he _had_ poked, he might have been bitten.

 _Metaphorically_ , though he really never will forget the time where he tried poking Rocket awake and ended up having to Band-aid his index finger for a week. 

The point being: Gamora’s Dad was a vague, mysterious, slightly shady concept that lingered behind her weird curfew and ability to be super formal when the occasion demanded it, and Peter always figured that he was just some super rich guy and super rich guys, on principle, were usually sort of jerks. 

“The _leader_ of the _frickin’ mob_?!”

“Rocket –”

“You’re tellin’ me – are you _really_ sayin’, here, that your big tall business suit dad with the weird bald head –”

“Your father’s head is also bald,” points out Drax.

“It’s a weird bald head!” snaps Rocket, his whiny, pre-pubescent voice growing incrementally whiny-er and more pre-pubescent, tugging a little at his own hair such that his curls stick up even worst that Peter’s are. “So what’re we talkin’ here? Is this Jabba the Hutt crime lord or Don Corleone crime lord?”

“I don’t know who that is,” says Gamora, whose face seems incapable of deciding whether it wants to look angry or worried and hanging somewhere in the weird middle, kind of like she’s constipated.

“ _How_ have you seen the Godfather, you’re fourteen!” says Peter.

“Exactly!” says Rocket.

“We all collectively agreed that _fifteen_ –”

“Ugh, he is nowhere near as useless as Jabba the Hutt,” snaps Nebula. “Which is the _point_.”

“You don’t get to be like this right now!” says Gamora, equally snappish, balling her fists. “Have you been of any help at all? No, _you_ just sulk around acting smug –”

“Because I’ve been saying this for the past _year_ –”

“And didn’t have any real proof! _Or_ a plan!”

“And your genius plan last night was to _run away from home_ ,” snarls Nebula, arms crossed tightly over her skinny frame, “so great going, genius!”

“You just said genius _twice_!” yells Gamora.

“Where would you have run to?” asks Mantis, who is clutching the ginger root murder book Nebula had given her to her chest like a shield, her giant buggy glasses slipping down her nose. 

“Our house, _obviously_ ,” says Rocket immediately, rolling his eyes.

“My house is also open to those in need,” says Drax, as though offended they didn’t turn to him first. Groot makes a face and signs at him; Rocket throws his hands up.

“His house _is_ way too small, thank you Groot!”

“Our house is not that big either,” says Mantis, sounding distraught about it.

“Aaargh, shut _up_!” roars Gamora, shooting to her feet. “Shut up shut up shut _up_! Everyone _shut. Up_!”

As far as team meetings go, Peter has to acknowledge that this is not, all things considered, their least productive. There was that time at the very beginning of last year when Peter had made the phenomenal mistake of agreeing to “study” with resident beautiful, way-out-of-his-league, stupidly wealthy classmate Ayesha Sovereign, who Peter now knows is the daughter of a known white supremacist and also a huge brat. Rocket had tried to steal her car keys from her purse as she wrinkled her nose at their small kitchen, and the afore-mentioned team meeting happened at the local police station, because Ayesha _called the cops_ on them. There was a lot of incoherent screaming on the part of all bodies present. 

So – not the worst thing Peter’s ever seen. But _boy_ , is this up there.

“Okay, okay, _everyone_ calm down,” he says, tripping to his feet from his place perched on the slide railing and raising his hands, one towards Gamora, who is still on her feet and looking like she’s going to stab someone with the trusty math class compass he knows she has in her backpack; and the other towards Nebula, who is standing so stiffly Peter needs to wonder for a second whether she’s somehow magically turned to stone. Rocket is on his other side, having donned his most expressive _are you kidding me right now_ face, and Mantis is hovering behind Drax, pulling nervously at the ends of her pigtails while Groot sniffs and pushes his round reflective glasses up the bridge of his flat nose on her other side. Peter takes a deep breath – in through the nose, out through the mouth, like his mom taught him when he was six years old and didn’t want to start the first grade – and looks towards Gamora. 

“ _Please_ ,” he adds, and some divine intervening force of nature causes her to look away from Nebula and at him. A fraction of the murder-y-ness in her expression melts away.

Peter isn’t sure how he feels about that. His brain and general body are too overwhelmed to process it.

On his other side, Nebula hugs her arms closer to herself and finally comes out of her stoniness; she slides down against the big plastic puzzle tabs on the railing so that they make ominous _flump flump_ noises as she goes, and pulls her knees tightly against her chest once her butt hits the jungle jim platform, glare still firmly in place.

“Okay,” Peter says, for a third time. “ _Okay_.” He keeps looking at Gamora, which seems to calm _her_ down, even if her constipated expression is twisting Peter’s stomach into knots. Gamora is the coolest person Peter knows; _nothing_ shakes her, and even when Rocket accidentally lands them in detention for the millionth time or her soccer team doesn’t win, she jerks her chin up in that uniquely Gamora way and glares. 

Even if, Peter is now realizing, her scary dad might have uncool things to say about it, which makes something in his chest start doing this weird thing where it deflates like a sad balloon, leaving him all cold, because obviously this has been a suspicion for some time and obviously there’s more to it than the simple statement, “my dad is a criminal,” and he had _no idea_ because she didn’t _say_ anything – 

She looks a little bit like a dam has broken, he keeps thinking – her hands keep tugging at the hem of her windbreaker and she’s been gnawing on her bottom lip the entire time they’ve been squabbling, like she can’t make herself stop doing it unless she opens her mouth to yell.

Peter takes another deep breath and tries to square his shoulders because that’s what team leaders do in the movies and valiantly ignores the fact that he feels a little bit woozy.

“Oh- _kay_ ,” he says, for the fourth frickin’ time. Gamora’s jaw twitches, which Peter recognizes as her expectant _please elaborate_ twitch. At least she’s not so freaked out that her twitches are off. For some reason, this makes his chest-deflating pick up in pace. “Do you guys have proof?”

“Yes,” she says immediately, while Nebula makes a funny sort of noncommittal noise from behind him. “Yes, we – you know that crazy guy who was on the news last year?”

“The one who ate his goldfish?” asks Peter.

“The one who took all those dumb civilians hostage so that he could steal his brother’s inheritance,” says Nebula, from behind him.

“Oh – _oh_ , that guy –”

“Yes,” says Gamora, the corners of her mouth tight. “Yesterday we heard our father talking to his assistant about a death which took place two weeks ago, which was originally thought to be a suicide by one of the family members of inheritance guy’s victims, but was actually –” She cuts off, her jaw locking, like her mouth flat out refuses to finish the sentence.

“Actually what?” asks Mantis, her nose twitching. Groot signs something at Rocket on her other side, and Rocket says,

“No, Groot, they didn’t _go to Wisconsin_.”

“Why would a dead person go to Wisconsin?” asks Mantis.

“What? _You_ want to go to Wisconsin? What the heck’s in Wisconsin, Groot?”

Groot frowns and points at the giant spray-painted weiner on the front of the slide. Gamora groans loudly and buries her face in her hands.

“Wait,” says Rocket. “ _Are_ we goin’ to Wisconsin?”

“No – no one’s going to Wisconsin!” says Peter. “Wisconsin sucks!”

“So what’s the point!”

“The _point_ ,” says Peter, wanting very much to also bury his face in his hands, “is that – this. This guy was – was –”

“Murdered,” supplies Nebula, monotonous.

“By our _father_ ,” Gamora grits out between her teeth, glaring determinedly at a rusted corner of the platform.

There’s a weird sort of moment where no one says anything.The thing is, even if he had absolutely nothing to do with that one guy’s staged death that was tangentially related to crazy inheritance man, Peter feels weirdly responsible. Not for, like, the _death_ , sure, but for _something_. It’s annoying, because seeing Gamora look freaked out is not only freaking him out, it’s making him want to do dumb things like hold her hand so that she looks _less_ like she’s freaking out, except _that_ takes him back to remembering how he was the world’s worst friend and never realized that something was bothering her until it was too late and her dad’s some kind of evil person.

He has experience with evil dads, Peter thinks. He should have seen this _coming_ , maybe even as soon as the ninth grade hair dyeing era. 

And then Gamora says, abrupt and explosive into the weird silence, “Argh, we should have _known_ , I should have _know_ who he was!”

Peter watches Nebula’s fingers close more tightly around the plastic of her prosthetic and thinks, _oh_.

The deflating in his chest is happening because Gamora never told him anything was wrong.

“How was this man murdered?” asks Drax, like one might ask a particularly complex math question.

“Dude, come _on_!”

“It’s a valid question!”

“Shut _up_ Rocket –”

“This is why I said telling these morons was a bad idea!”

“What other option did we have! He admitted it, we heard him loud and clear and have a date and place of meeting –”

“The _alley behind the Baskin Robbins_ , yes, I’m aware –”

“No, Groot, they could not have _run away to Wisconsin -_ -”

 _“Everyone shut up!_ ” yells Peter, surprising himself with the force and suddenness of his own voice so much that he actually stumbles one step backwards. Belatedly, he hopes no one does anything like bite him, or aim kicks at his crotch or shins. 

But there are no bites or crotch kicks, because it’s suddenly like someone pressed pause on a VHS player and the screen’s frozen, but all glitch-y ‘cause it’s old; most everyone stops moving and talking immediately, with one or two twitchy movements where Rocket jerks his elbow and Mantis straightens her glasses and Drax sits down on the top of the slide with a heavy _thump_. Gamora and Nebula are absolutely still, which is an annoying skill that they seem to both have had since forever.

He didn’t expect him yelling would accomplish anything at all, which is why it takes his brain a second to catch up with the blessed silence, and for a moment, Peter flounders. Vaguely, he wonders if they’re bound by law to do something – like maybe tell a responsible adult, only Peter can’t think of any responsible adults who would believe them outside of Yondu.

Who is not – _entirely_ out of the question –

“Uh – um, okay, ah – wow. Right. Good. That worked.” He takes _yet another_ deep breath. “So, um.” He grimaces a bit, at himself. “What’s the plan.” 

“Go to the police?” says Mantis in a small voice, as though she’s worried she’s breaking some kind of rule by speaking again. Somehow, this makes Peter feel even worst.

“That’s the problem,” says Gamora, a very faint, nigh-inconceivable note in her voice trembling. “We just know what we heard. It’ll be our word against his, and who are the police more likely to believe?”

Rocket makes a funny scoffing noise in the back of his throat. Peter bites the inside of his cheek and imagines Gamora and Nebula standing in a police station trying to explain that their Forbes Magazine adoptive father is of all things some kind of mob boss out of the _Godfather_.

Or, wait – did they decide he was Corleone level? Obviously, Jabba was a no, but Peter can’t remember if they really _agreed_ –

“So this sucks,” says Rocket, into Peter’s silence. 

“Thank you, Captain Obvious moron,” says Nebula into her knees.

“The expression’s just _captain obvious_ , it doesn’t make sense if you add the _moron_ on the end, _moron_ ,” says Rocket, his shoulders lifting a little like they do whenever he’s needled, like some kind of small but vicious woodland creature. 

“You are not the captain of anything,” Drax protests, at the same time Nebula growls “I don’t _care_ , _moron_ ,” which is, to be fair, not wholly unusual in itself, as Nebula is on any given day usually growling “I don’t care, moron,” at _someone_. 

“Hey!”

“Please do not argue again,” moans Mantis softly, covering her ears. “We are already maybe going to die because of Jabba the Hutt.”

“We clearly established that weird bald head guy is more dangerous than Jabba the Hutt!”

“How do we know he is dangerous? We do not have proof outside of the crazy inheritance man.”

Peter’s brain, which has up until this point been tuning them out and focusing on the way Gamora is tugging at the ends of her sleeves and crappy feeling at the pit of his stomach, decides to let half a sentence filter into his ears.

“Do not refer to my father as weird bald head guy.”

“ _You’re_ the one who said you hate him!”

“Well _you_ –”

An idea clicks into place in Peter’s head.

“We don’t have enough proof,” he says, without really thinking about it; Gamora, who has been nearly as silent as Groot this entire time, looks up sharply at his voice, but everyone else continues to squabble. Her brown eyes are wide and dark with anxiety, and Peter’s stomach flips, _again_. All of first period, he had ignored Mr. Dey talking because Gamora kept chewing on her pencil beside him, to the point where good old Dey started giving him concerned looks – never a good thing, in Peter’s experience. And anyway, if his stomach flips any more, it’s gonna be sitting in the sand pit of the Treehouse, and that’s the last thing this disaster of a team meeting needs. Abruptly, he looks away from her, so deliberately that his head actually turns. Groot has quietly broken away from Rocket’s side to sit down beside Gamora and wordlessly take her brown hand in his darker, smaller one, and Peter watches him instead of looking back at Gamora, who still looking right at him like she’s not sure where else to look.

“We don’t have enough proof,” says Peter, his voice rising, somehow cutting through the squabbling, something like momentum pushing its way into it. “Guys, we need _proof_.”

Silence. 

Six pairs of eyes blink at him.

“And how will we acquire this proof?” asks Drax finally, crossing his meaty arms over his chest.

Gamora is still looking at Peter. Peter avoids her eyes, doesn’t see the growing twinge of hurt in them, and spreads his arms out wide.

“I have,” says Peter, “a _plan_.”

**

“This is a _terrible_ plan,” hisses Rocket into Peter’s ear in the backseat of the pickup, where all seven of them are very illegally squeezed together like sardines. “Like, I couldn’t even call this a plan. This is barely one small tiny _part_ of a plan. Twelve percent of a plan.”

“Dude, shut up,” Peter manages out of the corner of his mouth, hoping desperately that the tinny music coming out of the car’s speakers is enough to drown out Rocket’s traitorous hissing. On any other given day, Peter would have complete faith in the miracle-working powers of David Bowie’s voice, but right now, there’s too much at risk. So much at risk, in fact, that Peter very maturely stops himself from reminding Rocket that he hasn’t even learned percents in school yet, so who is _he_ to talk, anyway.

Rocket’s supposed to be some kind of child genius, so like, that’s probably a useless argument anyway, but Peter decides to let himself have that one, hypothetically.

“You know what this is?” says Rocket. “A _pla_.”

Peter grits his teeth, doesn’t bring up the percents, and very recklessly pinches Rocket’s side with his free fingers and hopes that he doesn’t get bitten. 

“Y’all still in one piece back there?” asks Yondu from the driver’s seat, peering into the rearview mirror with narrowed eyes. “Wha’s this thing again?”

“House party,” Peter squeaks, prying Rocket’s weirdly sharp nails from his leg. He clears his throat, hoping that Yondu’s internal World’s Okayest Dad incredibly sensitive alarm bells don’t get triggered.

“And y’all are … invited,” Yondu says slowly, like he’s still not quite sure whether he ought to believe it, which quite frankly Peter thinks is a bit insulting. They’re not _total_ losers, okay; they get invited to the _occasional_ party.

Which, fine, none of those parties are ones thrown by their more affluent, well-connected classmates, but still. _Still_.

Yondu raises one eloquent eyebrow over bloodshot eye in the mirror and Peter clears his throat again, hard.

“We’re, uh – they – it’s kinda an all welcome sorta shindig.”

“Oooh,” says Kraglin, from shotgun, where he’s been flipping through a National Geographic magazine and humming along to the tape. He braces a hand against the seat back and hauls himself around to grin at them in the back, his fake tooth glinting in the bad lighting. It’s genuine, Peter has to acknowledge. “Them always were the best parties, eh Yondu?”

“Hnh,” grunts Yondu, “You better put that Godfersaken magazine away ‘fore we get to the club.”

“It’s innerestin’!” says Kraglin. “Got pitchers of squirrels in it.”

“Eugch,” says Yondu. “I hate squirrels. You sure Groot’s gonna be okay?”

This is directed at Peter, who is very proud of himself for not jumping and definitively keeping his cool as he leans back as casually as is possible in sardine formation and offers his most trustworthy smile to the rearview mirror. 

“I will keep him safe!” pipes up Mantis from Rocket’s other side, nodding emphatically such that her ponytail bobs. “You should go out and relax.”

“Yep!” says Peter, as Rocket grabs Mantis’s leg to stop its furious erratic bounce. “That’s totally right, Yondu, y’all should – go and. Be adults.”

“You always say you’re a loser,” adds Rocket helpfully, “so now you can not be one! Go out! Party!”

“Like we are doing,” says Drax proudly. Mantis mouths, _What do adults do?_ at Peter, who hopes that his smile is not turning pained.

“It’s going to be fun,” offers Gamora, her voice tight, and then elbows Nebula, who glares and says, “It is going to be fun,” in perfect monotone.

“That’s the spirit,” says Kraglin at the windshield, grinning again and cracking open a can of beer from the few that are propped up in the ancient cupholders. “Hey Groot, check this out, this squirrel’s got a sorta mustache, you’d like ‘im.”

While Groot cranes his long neck over the front seat to see the mustache squirrel and plants his sandaled foot squarely in Drax’s face in the process, Peter clears his throat uncomfortably and hopes, once again, that Yondu’s alarm system will throw him a bone. Worst comes to worst, Peter thinks, he can _probably_ chalk his vague look of anguish up to the way Rocket’s toolbelt is digging into his hipbone or how Groot just farted, or even, if desperate, how warm Gamora’s arm is against his. Like, really, Peter thinks, he’s an _ace_ liar. They should be fine.

Yondu’s eyes are still narrowed in the rearview mirror.

“C’mon, man,” says Peter, proud of how smooth and nonchalant his voice is as it emerges. “We’ll be fine.”

There’s a beat; Peter holds his breath.

“I catch your ass tryin’a drive home drunk –”

“I don’t have a car!”

“You heard me boy.”

“ _Okay_ , Yondu –”

“I’ll taser him,” offers Rocket helpfully.

“You don’t even _have_ a –”

“Homemade, duh,” says Rocket.

“Oh my God –”

“Can I see?”

“Wait –”

“Errebody shut up,” cuts in Yondu’s voice. His shoulders, which Peter knows have been relaxed in a very deliberate and practical fashion (the asshole) shift very slightly, and he sniffs at the steering wheel. “Don’t call me ‘less you need anythin’, you hear? An’ listen the hell up. Gamora’s in charge.”

Over Peter’s protests, Gamora says,

“I’ll make sure nobody gets into any cars except yours.”

“Or a policeman’s,” says Drax. “They would never drive inebriated.”

“Now jus’ one sec,” says Kraglin, “I knew a feller once. Piss drunk on duty all the time. Helluva guy.”

“Go on, git the hell outta my car,” says Yondu, “and damn well have a good time. Buncha loser kids. Keep an eye out, girlie.”

“ _I’m_ the oldest!” says Peter again, as Rocket shoves him out of the car door and into the chill night air.

He straightens up to the screech of the pickup’s old tires on the pavement as Yondu and Kraglin pull away from the curb, stumbling a little because his shoelaces are conveniently (artfully, he’d say any other time, but right now he feels like a dumbass) untied, and Peter resists the urge to rub his arms at the sudden chill of being un-sardined and out on the open sidewalk. 

“Woah,” says Rocket quietly, as Groot’s already wide eyes get wider.

No wonder Yondu was suspicious.

Everything about this neighborhood feels _large_ , from the width of the beautifully paved road to the smoothness of the sidewalk to the way the immaculately-groomed front lawn of the house just behind them is so big that it makes the house look like it exists in its own realm, walled off from the other, equally big and beautiful and intimidating houses by trees. 

Weird, Peter thinks, how there’s a back alley and a shady ice cream franchise just two blocks over, in the real world.

That’s more their speed, even though Peter guesses it isn’t gonna have any old tires in its front lawn. Still – he hopes Rocket doesn’t steal anything. Like the light fixtures, or the door.

That front door is so fancy Peter figures it’s begging to be stolen.

The music from inside Ronan’s stupid fancy house is muffled, but Peter can still feel it vibrate under his feet as they all slowly turn as one, yet again objectively lamely Peter thinks, to face _not_ the large and see-through front windows, but the shadowy garden path leading to the likely enormous backyard. Now, if they could just get a bit closer, Peter’s genius plan is likely going to go off without a hitch.

“I’m sayin’ this again,” says Rocket, from somewhere around Peter’s elbow. “This is a terrible plan.”

“It’s the only one we’ve got,” Gamora says, before Peter can protest. 

“Are we late?” asks Mantis, peering over the flower bushes framing the stone path that leads to the house’s fenced-off backyard. “What if we have missed –”

“There!” hisses Gamora, pushing past Drax and moving towards the hedge their side of the wall. Peter feels himself yanked forward and realizes that she’s grabbed onto the sleeve of his shirt and is tugging him along, and he barely has time to brace himself before he nearly runs face-first into Rich Person Hedge. 

“Behind the big tree over there, that’s the guy!”

“How can you even _see_ that far? It’s half-pitch black out here.”

“Rat face makes a good point,” mutters Nebula, uncomfortably close to Peter’s ear where they’re all crowded behind the hedge, and Gamora turns around to glare at her, which effectively puts _her_ face centimeters away from his own. He reaches down and pries her fingers off of the ratty plaid of his sleeve and takes a step back, making to move around her to peer over the hedge himself, but now she’s turned her frown on him. It’s confused, almost, which is weird, but if she wants to, he figures, she’ll tell him about it, or something. That’s been his experience, anyway – 

“Groot, what’re you – oh, _shit_ , they’re leaving!” 

“ _What_!”

“Shhh!”

“Ugh, move, your elbow’s in my face –”

“You guys!”

“We have to follow them around,” says Gamora, her voice clean and cutting through the muffled elbowing. 

“We’ll never make it ‘round the neighborhood in time to catch ‘em at their meeting,” says Rocket, and Drax, who’s been half shoved into the hedge by this point, says, 

“Rocket is annoying but he makes a good point.”

“ _You’re_ annoying, you know that?”

“Yes,” says Drax, looking pleased with himself, “I do know.”

“Okay, so how do we get across to the other side of the house quickly?”

So, to be clear, Peter’s plan _was_ ingenious. It _was_. But sometimes life conspires against you in the form of just slightly badly timed drop offs by your cantankerous foster dad, and this is really one of those times.

Peter figures, as he straightens up from the hedge and firmly sets aside the weird anxiety in his stomach that started when Gamora grabbed his arm, that some things in life are specifically designed to make him hate everything about existence. Through the intervention of some invisible force, everyone else straightens up in synch after him, and together, they look over through to tall open-concept windows of the house in front of them to where a gaggle of their classmates are visibly partying under spotty strobe lighting.

The windows are so clear and big that Peter can see Ayesha Sovereign’s prim smile through the flashing lights.

He looks back at his friends.

Rocket looks down at his own hands, and then up at Groot, and then at the rest of the group.

“If this wasn’t a terrible plan before,” he says, “it sure as frickin’ hell is now.”

“C’mon,” says Peter, “it’ll be – they won’t even notice we’re _there_ –”

“Oh, pal, they’ll _notice_.”

“Rocket –”

“How will they not notice!” says Rocket, grabbing one of Groot’s hands and waving it in Peter’s face. Groot smiles and pulls a somewhat rumpled looking daisy out of his shorts pocket, and promptly puts it in his mouth.

Peter wonders how realistically possible it would be to officially Give Up.

“We could wear a disguise,” Mantis suggests, reaching into her backpack and pulling out a scarf. “See?”

“Mantis,” says Peter, “take my scarf off your head –”

“Yeah,” says Rocket, “throw the scarf, ‘cause there’s no frickin’ way Ronan and his goonie friends are gonna let _us_ into that house!”

Before Peter can retort, Gamora speaks.

“New plan!” Peter reflexively stumbles back a couple steps as she shoves forward around Drax and pries Rocket’s fingers off of Groot’s wrist. She looks right at him. 

“Peter goes into the house –”

“What!” yelps Peter, his voice coming out an octave and a half wrong. “No, no way –”

“ _Peter_ goes in,” Gamora repeats, in a tone brooking no argument, “and distracts the group beside the door long enough for the rest of us to slip past. From there we can find our way to the back door.”

For the first time since the beginning that afternoon, Peter holds her gaze. Her dark eyes are bright and burning and full of something he rarely sees in Gamora.

 _Please_.

“Son of a bitch,” he says, and wishes that Yondu wasn’t right and he wasn’t this big of a sucker, “just – five minutes. I can do it for five.”

They don’t have that much time to pull this off anyway, do they – the shady guys they came here to stake out are already halfway to Baskin Robbins by now. 

Gamora breaks into what he can only call a relieved smile, and Peter can’t help but think that this is a _terrible_ plan.

**

The thing about it is that in theory, Peter _could_ have been one of the kids milling around in this giant mansion of a house with its open concept insides and n to the whatever millionth dollar patio and garden the size of a small park. That is, in fact, one of the pitches the Devil gave him last year, in place of like, actually being a decent parent. _Come to the Dark Side, there’s lamborghinis_ , or whatever, which Peter has to admit he did not find utterly unpalatable for a little while there, before all the shit hit the fan. Lamborghinis are cool on principle, especially if you’re a teenage kid who was taught how to drive stick from the age of ten by your auto shop-owning foster parent. The problem is that lamborghinis and fancy houses and two hundred dollar running shoes start leaving a sour taste in your mouth when you realize that the guy offering them to you had your mother murdered to further his own illegal business. 

This is what Peter’s thinking about as he shoves his hands into his pockets and puts on his most affected swagger on his way up the front steps of the house, hoping that these morons dress like normal people at house parties do, and that his graphic t-shirt and ratty jeans aren’t going to be _too_ out of place when he slips in through the unlocked front door. He hesitates only once, glancing back to where his siblings and friends are crowded behind one of the bigger Rich Person Hedges and offering him miscellaneous expressions of encouragement.

Growing up with Yondu and four other kids in the house means that Peter likely wouldn’t have known what to do with all of this crap even if he’d gone to the proverbial Dark Side _anyway_ , he thinks, as he pulls the very steal-able door open. And growing up with Yondu and four other kids in the house also means that Peter has had some quality time to develop what he personally thinks are some A-grade acting skills.

Like Peter said – he’s an _ace_ liar.

He grins and winks at the first girl he passes on his way in, taking half a second to pause in front of the floor length mirror in the hall and roll up his plaid sleeves so he doesn’t look like a total loser before ducking into the main room and grabbing someone’s unattended drink from its place on the giant indoor pool table, finally leaning artfully against the leather arm of a couch more expensive than his entire life savings.

To be fair, Peter doesn’t actually _have_ life savings – he keeps his small wad of cash stuffed under his mattress like Yondu does – but, you know. The principle of the thing. 

If his calculations are correct, he’s stuck himself out as a James Bond-esque suave sore thumb _just_ right enough that in three, two, _one_ –

“Quill? What in the hell are you doing here?”

Peter looks over and does his best to look casually surprised.

“Oh, hey, Ronan! Great party, huh?”

Ronan has, since the ninth grade, always been at least a head taller than Peter. The arrival of Peter’s slightly belated and quite sizeable growth spurt has apparently done nothing at all to change this fact, so Peter has to look up to be able to properly appreciate the curl of the other boy’s lip at what appears to be Peter’s mere presence in this swanky house.

“I don’t recall ever inviting you,” he says, which, like, wow, Peter thinks, _rude_.

“Friend of a friend, y’know,” says Peter, waving his free hand vaguely. “So, uh – nice house, huh? Never seen anything like it before.”

“Be careful he doesn’t steal anything,” comes Ayesha’s unmistakable articulate drawl from behind Ronan. Peter offers his most charming smile to the disgusted wrinkle of her nose.

“Hey now, that was my little brother, not me,” Peter says, hoping his jaw doesn’t tick. 

“Hmph,” says Ayesha, sniffing so affectedly that her characteristic plethora of gold jewelry – _real_ gold, she’d once informed the class – dangles. “Yes, I suppose it is in his blood.”

Ronan snorts. Peter bites down so hard on his tongue he almost breaks skin, and quickly takes a large swallow of his unknown drink, which turns out to be vodka. 

The noise Ayesha makes at the spray of drink that dribbles down Peter’s front is so exaggerated you’d think he’d gotten it all on _her_ and not himself, like he actually did. Ronan makes a similarly grossed-out sound and takes a step back, eyeing Peter like a particularly disgusting bug. Which he’s usually doing, to be fair – despite the fact that Ronan totally got suspended two years ago for hate speech, Peter’s pretty sure his net worth is more than like, all of Peter’s possessions put together. Peter possesses a broken walkman, one good pair of Converse and his annoyingly curly mop of hair, so that’s not really saying much, but – 

Trying his best to offer an apologetic smile, Peter’s watering eyes catch on a familiar group of figures huddled behind one of the big pillars in the front hallway of the house.

“Well, it’s been uninspiring as always, Quill,” says Ronan, like he’s talking down at him, which he actually is, literally speaking. He makes to turn away, smoothing down his pristine polo shirt. “Try not to stick around any longer.”

Peter can distinctly see Gamora looking for an opening to make a mad dash across the living room, her bottom lip caught between her teeth, and he groans internally.

Oh, God.

He _did_ say five minutes, didn’t he.

“Uh, hey – Ronan, _pal_ , wait – did I say this party was good?” The other boy turns back around, eyes rapidly narrowing, and Peter’s free hand fumbles a little before resting as casually as possible on the back of the couch he’s leaning against, “I mean, it’s alright, but this music, man? Like, really, who listens to this junk?” Ayesha gasps like Peter’s just delivered a class-A zinger, which for some reason imbibes him with what is likely a suicidal brand of confidence. “Actually, you know what would make things great? If I personally started to sing the seminal Eagles masterpiece _Hotel California_ word for word – hey everyone, check it out, I’m gonna sing a song –”

“ _Quill_ –”

“On a dark desert highway, wind in my hair –”

“Get the hell out of my –”

“ _WARM SMELL OF COLITAS, RISING UP IN THE AIR –_ oh, _shit_ –”

Peter yelps as two large hands grab him roughly by the collar of his plaid shirt and somehow manage to _lift him into the air_. 

“You’ll be lucky if I don’t physically throw your pathetic ass out the front door, Quill!”

The whole lifted-into-the-air thing is, in Peter’s opinion, ridiculously unfair, because this asshole is the same _age_ as him – but it _does_ very fortuitously give him the vantage point he needs to see the ends of Mantis’s dark hair flick around the back corner that leads to the other side of Ronan’s house. He takes one short moment to offer his most charming smile to the gaggle of drunk classmates standing in the living room gaping at him before saying,

“Holy shit, what’s that over there?”

Almost every stupid head in the stupid room turns; Peter’s feet hit the ground running.

**

Five minutes later, arms still sore from the desperate yanking out of shirtsleeves performed moments before, Peter rounds his third lit corner -- does this house have _all_ its lights on all the time? -- and slouches against the wall, glaring at his friends.

“You owe me a shirt,” he manages, panting. “And _all_ of my dignity.”

“You never had any dignity to begin with,” says Nebula, who is helping Gamora lower Rocket down through a pried-open window. For such a fancy-ass house, Peter thinks, the security in this place sure is lax. So lax, in fact, that there wasn't a single person occupying any space outside of the living room and kitchen downstairs, which is weird for a house party -- unless Ronan's parents are super strict? Most house parties have drunk weirdos _everywhere_ , Peter thinks, frowning, the muffled thumping of the music he bad-mouthed downstairs still pounding in his ears. Still – he figures they’ve probably only got minutes before Ronan and his dumb friends figure out where the hell Peter went, which means –

“Groot, I swear to all that’s holy, if you let go’a that ledge to sign at me I ain’t never speakin’ to you again,” hisses Rocket, his legs dangling. 

“You let Groot climb down the window _first_?” says Peter, all security system-related concerns forgotten immediately as he gapes at Gamora and continues to clutch at his ribs, over his still-damp, slightly sticky t-shirt.

“No!” snaps Gamora, “ _Maybe_ – he really wanted to go!”

“You don’t just _let_ him –” Peter pokes his head out of the window to peer down in the dark at Groot, who is miraculously on the ground and has already begun a very close inspection of the bed of peonies, and Rocket, who is scaling the drain pipes with a shocking amount of agility. “God – okay, guys, we don’t have a lot of time, we have to –”

“Why’s your shirt all wet?” asks Rocket, wrinkling his nose up at Peter. “You smell like booze.”

“He cannot drive the car then,” says Mantis, who is hovering behind Nebula and wringing her hands.

Which, really, Peter thinks, is the _most_ unhelpful thing anyone’s said all night.

By the time they’ve all made it to the ground, Peter’s started shivering from the cold, Drax has almost twisted his ankle twice, and Groot has started to methodically collect petals from each of the individual flowers in the bed. Gamora drops down last, landing with far more grace than should be universally fair in the grass, and Peter takes a moment to breathe.

“Okay. Anyone hurt?”

“No.”

“Nah.”

“Groot just farted again.”

“We are all unharmed,” says Gamora firmly, her eyes trained on the open window.

“Perfect,” says Peter. The garden is eerily quiet, the sound of the party music barely-audible on this side of the house, and Peter can barely see the road on the other side of the park-sized yard for all the tall, well-groomed trees lining the fence. But despite the fact that they’re about to run after a pair of mobsters into a back alley with little to no life experience and even fewer weapons, Peter feels his shoulders relax marginally now that they’re out of the mansion. How does that expression go again? Out of the fire, right? “So now all we have to do is get outta here before anyone can see u –”

 _Out of the_ frying pan, Peter's brain decides to remind him abruptly. _Out of the_ frying pan _, into the --_

__

“Hey!” yells a deep male voice from other side of the backyard. “What the hell are those kids doing there!”

And Peter, in a great fit of well-timed introspection, marvels at the fact that he has the wherewithal to grab Groot’s hand before all hell breaks loose. 


	3. put on your red shoes and dance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So.
> 
> The dumpster.
> 
> Aaah, the dumpster.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WOW ... i am ALIVE .... WOW ....
> 
> not sure what happened in the middle there where i dropped off the map but i was reading back thru the truly amazing positive feedback and encouragement this fic has gotten & i thought u know what? i should kick my butt into gear and finish my one and only chapter story.
> 
> apologies for the truly behemoth size of this chapter & ofc the title is from david bowie as are all the titles

So.

The dumpster.

Aaah, the dumpster.

Peter sure does hate the feeling of garbage digging into his back. This is one of his primary motivations for getting them out of this dumpster they’ve started to call home. His secondary motivation is that the deadly-weapon-carrying bad guys might come back and snoop around, find them, and promptly murder them all. That would be bad. To have chillaxed here, in this Baskin Robbins dumpster, this whole time -- only for the assholes to _return_.

That would be. Tremendously craptastic, Peter has to say.

Of course, neither of these is a motivation that he vocalizes into the phone.

“Uh huh. Uh huh. No -- yeah --” Peter grimaces. The others seem to pick up on this even in the dark; their uncharacteristic lack of obnoxious nattering speaks of the universal _Yondu’s chewing you out_ silence of sympathy. “No, I know -- I know you been trying to -- Yondu -- _yeah_ , I get it -- Jesus, man, I’m not givin’ you cheek, I know I should’a -- c’mon, man, would you listen to what I’m trying to say, _please_!”

This _please_ seems to fall on deaf ears -- metaphorically, though Yondu’s hearing really ain’t what it once was. Peter sighs, and pulls his cracked cellphone away from his ear a little bit so that he can look beseechingly at Rocket. The muffled sound of Yondu’s yelling grows just slightly louder in the terrible acoustics of the dumpster; Rocket, who is a traitor, shakes his head wildly in response, so Peter narrows his eyes and sticks the phone right back up against his own ear.

“ _\-- half pass one, boy, an’ now you know I can always tell from your squeakin’ voice somethin’s wrong --_ ”

 _“Nothing_ is wrong,” says Peter hotly, his neck flushed with the effort of coolly lying when he cannot be less cool. The garbage digging into his back is making his skin itch.

 _“Tha’s bullshit and you know it, Quill. I tol’ you to keep that damn piece a’ shit phone in your pocket in case you gotta call Kraglin --_ ”

“Aw, sure, in case we gotta call _Kraglin_ \--”

“ _Didn’t I tell you t’stow yer cheek, boy_ \--”

It’s easy to tune Yondu out over the phone most of the time, because Peter’s learned over the years that where he and the gang are concerned, Yondu really is _mostly_ all bark and very little bite. If he’s not there right up in your face making you feel like a prime idiot, it’s never hard to start composing song lyrics in your head while he runs himself out of steam and decides that you didn’t actually do nothing wrong.

The problem is, this time, tuning Yondu out means focusing on everything else. Like how gross and warm the dumpster is -- outside was cold, and when Nebula pushed the lid up just slightly to peak out and see if the coast was clear, a blast of cool air snuck in to bite at them. Peter nearly startled for it, he was so used to the warmth, though that might’ve also been because Mantis took that exact opportunity to sneeze, and Nebula thought it was the bad guys coming back to kill them so she yelped, and let go of the dumpster lid, which fell back down with a horrifying _clang_.

Nebula, of course, denied that any yelping was ever done. Peter would respect this in any other situation -- probably -- if not for the fact that they are all a little bit scared shitless, here. Some solidarity would be nice. It’s already bad enough that no one wants to touch the lid now, as if the whole alley is going to open up and eat them alive with its definitely-existent sharp bloody teeth if they ever leave the sanctuary of their dumpster again.

Pretty pathetic, Peter thinks. And _stupid_ that they’re so scared. He’s seen guns before. He’s _heard_ guns before.

He’s never run the distance from a rich person’s backyard to a Baskin Robbins alley, Ferris- Bueller-style-but-with-all-his-siblings-in-tow, being shot _at_.

It’s making his knees shake a little, now that the initial adrenaline of nearly being killed by the mob has worn off.

Bad thought. _Bad_ thought. Peter focuses on Yondu again, and any feelings of nauseated fear are immediately overridden by Being Annoyed. God, he wishes they were all home so he could be hiding under the blankets with Mantis and rewatching _Ferris Bueller_ for the billionth time.

“-- _I picked you up from that half-broke kids’ office_ \--”

“Oh, great, I call you needin’ help and that’s what the hell you start on --”

“ _‘Least tell me_ why _you’re callin’ in the middle of the damn night to ask for a ride from some unknown street I ain’t never heard of --_ ”

“I’ll _tell_ you what happened when we _get home_ , Yondu --”

“ _You think I can’t tell when you’re lyin’, boy_ \--”

“Will you just _listen_ for _one second_!” yells Peter, reflexively bringing his hand up to grab at his hair and nearly punching himself in the eye with Gamora’s hand, which he had forgotten was still clutched tightly in his. In the dark of the dumpster, Rocket groans and covers his face in his hands. Mantis makes a quiet squeaking noise.

There’s an abrupt silence on the other end of the line, which Peter takes to mean that he’s about to get the telling-off of a lifetime while surrounded by rotting Eggo packaging.

“ _‘S Twig okay?_ ”

“Ye -- yeah?” says Peter, frowning. His voice has decided to weirdly crack in response to the sudden demanding question, which is embarrassing. Peter’s fingers tighten around the phone as he suddenly feels his own reflexive annoyance and sarcasm -- something that emerges around Yondu instinctually even now, several years and multiple tearful shouting matches about how much they care later -- abruptly dissolve. Groot’s definitely been better; the tears spattered against the insides of his glasses’ lenses are a testament to that, as is the piece of gum wrapper Peter realizes with a sinking feeling is hanging from one of the kid’s dreads. “He’s safe. Gamora kept an eye out.”

In the dark, he can barely see her frown at him -- for the _second_ time this evening, God when will the weird looks _end_ \-- and so he hunches his shoulders a little bit and presses the phone closer to his ear, so much that he can feel its weird electronic heat against his earlobe.

He doesn’t let go of her hand, though. As much as his feelings are confused and the worst right now, this makes it easier for him to forget about the fact that they were very recently shot at.

Yondu is suddenly strangely silent on the other side of the line, which is making him nervous. Well, _more_ nervous.

He’s _not_ nervous, okay.

Finally, Yondu says, “ _Gamora kept an eye out?_ ”

“You said she was in charge, right?” says Peter dully; faintly, he can hear Rocket add a whine to his quiet groaning noise, but Peter doesn’t look up from where he’s staring at the peeling toaster waffle packaging that’s molting off of the rusty dumpster wall.

Yondu sniffs, quietly. And then: “ _Yeah, alright. Go on, tell me where you’re at. I’ll come getcha._ ”

It’s a lot easier after that, Peter thinks, to emerge into the quiet of the alleyway they escaped into.

Drax is the one brave enough to shoulder open the dumpster lid and poke his head out, and though the lid opens as loudly and obnoxiously as it falls closed, the concept of mobsters with guns seems to be less scary now that Yondu and his knarly teeth and broken down pickup with the shotgun stowed in the backseat is coming to pick them up. None of them will voice this out loud, of course, but Peter knows himself and his siblings well enough by now.

Peter is the last to emerge, left to haul himself over the edge because Gamora is making sure the kids reached the ground okay and everyone else has started to laugh nervously and shuffle towards the end of the alley. Rocket’s busted out the packet of skittles again, and is gently fishing out the green ones and handing them one by one to Groot as they herd themselves towards the open street and pass the half-decrepit bicycle rusting against the brick wall to their left. Nebula and Mantis are hovering close to each other and Drax is already listening intently to Rocket insist that he was never scared in the first place.

Peter’s sneakers hit the pavement awkwardly and he would’ve definitely fallen flat on his face if a slim set of strong fingers hadn’t grabbed his bicep to steady him.

Peter straightens himself up and pulls his arm out of Gamora’s grasp, and then sort of hates himself for pulling his arm out of Gamora’s grasp. Too late to back out now, though. He’s committed to being a moron _and_ a dick, apparently. He clears his throat, feeling weird and woozy, like his face has paled or something dumb like that.

“Um, thanks,” he mumbles.

Gamora, looking somehow less dishevelled than all the rest of them put together, is frowning hardcore. This is obvious even in the moonlit alleyway. Peter decides that it’s probably because her dad is a crazy person and they nearly got killed, which are both reasons any sane normal person would be frowning. Also, all their snooping didn’t amount to anything at the end of it anyway, so Groot’s going to be smelling like bad eggs for a week all for nothing. All Peter can remember from their ingenious stakeout is the sight of thugs one, two, and three pointing guns at them over the ugly rich person hedge lining Rona’s backyard, and the angry man’s voice yelling “ _Hey, who’s there_!”, which in their panic was a movie villain voice generic enough to possibly belong to any adult man in the whole city. Neither of these things are proof.

Rocket was right: this was a stupid plan.

Worried that they’re going to lose the others, Peter picks up his pace and half-jogs to where the alley meets the road. The flickering lights of the still-open Baskin Robbins wink at them almost invitingly from across the street.

“I wonder if Yondu will let us get ice cream when he arrives.”

“It’s too cold for ice cream, Mantis.”

“‘S never too cold for ice cream, leave Mantis alone.”

“It is too _late_ for ice cream, then. I just want to sleep.”

“Sleep on your own time, why don’t you.”

The pickup screeches up against the curb before the argument can truly start, and Peter suddenly feels his whole stomach stiffen up like it’s turned into the crappy plaster Kraglin once did up the bathroom wall with. Beside his shoulder, he can feel Gamora hovering, still tense, and he swallows, hard.

He knows he should tell Yondu the truth. Yondu will probably know what to do.

The car door slams, and Yondu’s standing there up against the hood wearing his pajamas under the familiar leather duster, his scarred-up face unreadable as he takes them in: dirty and sweaty and all of their hair looking like rats’ nests, Peter missing his favorite plaid shirt and Rocket clinging to the plus-sized bag of skittles. The night air is even colder now that it’s passed midnight, and Peter’s bare arms have erupted into goosebumps.

Yondu flicks his chin, like he’s in the movies or something.

“Go on, everyone pile up in the car. Mind yourselves, now.”

Peter stays put, feeling like his feet are glued to the pavement. For some reason, Gamora remains standing stock-still beside him instead of piling into the warm car with the others.

“So,” says Yondu, which is an opening if there ever was one, and Peter had planned to be honest, _really_ he had, but something weird and unexpected happens and the words twist themselves up in his throat.

He just wants to go home.

“We got kicked outta the party,” he says, and even though he’s sure Yondu can see the tell-tale tremble in his jaw, the old man stays quiet, and just gives Peter a nice long look in the light from the sputtering streetlamps and Baskin Robbins. Finally, he says,

“They musta been some kinda asshole, huh?”

Peter swallows, blinking.

“Yeah,” he manages.

Yondu tilts his head, then nods and motions with his chin for them to get in the car.  

Gamora grabs Peter’s arm before he can reach for the door handle, and Peter turns around to look at her to the sound of the driver’s seat door being opened and slammed shut again.

“Peter,” she starts, fingers tight around his bicep.

“Yeah?” he says, mostly focused on not shivering, because if he starts he knows he won’t be able to stop until halfway home and Rocket’ll use it as an excuse to poke him because “sharp jabs make the muscle spasms go away”.

“Are you okay?” asks Gamora, her voice weirdly forceful, and finally Peter looks at her properly and frowns.

“Yeah,” he says, “I’m fine.”

“Are you su --”

“I said I’m fine. Let’s just go home, okay? It’s been kind of a stupid night.”

Her dark eyes are big and wide, but he attributes that to the bad lightly and tries not to think about what usually happens in the movies when there’s funky lighting -- kissing happens, which he cannot believe was a thing on his mind only two days ago -- but if he thinks about that, he’s going to be even more miserable than he already is. He’d probably have kept looking at her, misery and all, if the car horn hadn’t honked aggressively, startling them both. Peter tugs his arm out of her hands for the third time that night and pulls the door open.

“Um -- you go first, Rocket’s gonna start pokin’ me --”

“Oh, um -- okay --”

It’s when he moves to follow her into the cramped backseat of the car that something catches his eye: a sleek black sedan, parked on the other side of the ice cream parlor, its engine abruptly starting as it smoothly pulls away from the curb and disappears down the street.

Peter pauses, hand on the car roof, and tilts his head. He feels himself breathe out, suddenly colder than before.

“What the …”

“Will you get in the damn car, already! I’m runnin’ out of skittles!”

**

All through first period, Peter feels like something really bad is about to happen.

Well, _worse_. Things have been pretty crappy so far, if he might say so himself.

“ -- but if you take a look here, at the _left_ of the chalkboard, I’ve taped up this really neat little page from an old Scandinavian journal that talks about how reindeer were thought to be mythological _beings_ because a couple common folk saw ‘em bucking around after eating hallucinogenic berries. Now, this doesn’t, uh, have any real bearings on the civil war, but if you go back far enough to the origins of Christmas --”

Mr. Dey scratches his nose as he fumbles with yet another piece of paper taped to their chalkboard -- which is never written on with any chalk, because the chalk’s always missing -- and smiles at the class with the usual dorky grin he wears when talking about bizarre historical sidenotes. If he’s not smiling like that, he’s usually looking a mix between tired and exasperated, which Peter has felt directed towards himself more than once.

Right now, Peter’s barely paying any attention to Mr. Dey, and instead staring at the peeling old-timey Nova recruitment poster on the bulletin board across from him and jiggling his right leg at top speed.

So the shady black car could have been a total coincidence. But what if it wasn’t? What if it was following them the whole time and now they’re going to _die_? Of course, there is the possibility that it’s only going to kill Peter because Peter’s the one who saw it and lead their snooping expedition, but what if the car didn’t care who lead the snooping expedition and is coming after all of them, in which case they’re back to the “all dying” scenario only this time it would all be Peter’s fault. So he should clearly warn the others -- but then, they’ll probably either panic or not take him seriously, he can totally attest to from experience. Except that shady cars could potentially be a serious business in the aftermath of mobster dads, and --

His eyes slip away from the crappy poster momentarily to catch Gamora frowning at him from across the room. She got to class late today -- after somehow managing to sneak back into her house last night, which Peter knows she did successfully because she texted Mantis before she went to sleep -- and that alone is enough to make Peter’s stomach tie itself up into knots.

What if her dad figures out that she got in after curfew? Worse, what if he figures out what she was _doing_ in the time period of curfew-breaking?

What if he knew where she was _all along_ , because _he_ was the shady black car?

He should tell Gamora, he thinks, fiddling with the pencil on his desk that he belatedly realizes must be one of Gamora’s because of how chewed up the eraser is. The sole of Peter’s sneaker makes a faint, yet consistent, squeaking noise against the classroom floor as his knee bounces.

 _Except_ , Peter thinks, what if telling her will only freak Gamora out even more?

_Squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak --_

Or _worse_ , he realizes with a sinking feeling in his stomach, what if Gamora already knew, and this becomes yet another thing she hasn’t told him? What if --

“Peter.”

Peter starts, and nearly knocks Gamora’s chewed-on pencil off of his desk. His sneakers’ squeaking comes to an abrupt halt.

Mr. Dey is standing over his table with his arms crossed loosely over his professional-looking polo shirt, sporting the signature tired-and-exasperated expression. The rest of the class has started buzzing as they avoid doing their in-class homework, and one of the papers taped onto the board has floated lamely to the floor.

Peter stares blankly at Mr. Dey’s raised eyebrows and familiar crazy hair. It takes him a second to compose himself and lean artfully on one elbow against the desk, pulling up his most innocent look. Peter clears his throat, as smoothly as possible, offering a winning smile.

“Yes?”

“Class,” says Mr. Dey, looking unimpressed. “Attention. Earth to Peter Quill. All that spaceman music keeps your head in the clouds a lot of the time, you know that?”

Peter makes a face, and Mr. Dey sighs.

“Listen, it’s not that hard. If you just learn to apply yourself a little bit --”

But Peter’s attention has once again slipped clean away from Mr. Dey and onto Gamora across the room, who is rolling her eraser in her fingers and looking more tense by the second.

“-- could really make something of yoursel -- Pete, are you even listening to me?”

“Huh?” Peter looks back over to see Mr. Dey looking at him appraisingly. Never a good thing, in Peter’s experience, only this time something in the exasperation on Mr. Dey’s face softens into understanding.

“Hey,” he says. “Everything alright, pal?”

Gamora is letting her class worksheet be doodled on by Bereet’s twin sister Karina -- manifestly un-Gamora-like in and of itself -- as she makes weird head-shaking motions at him from all the way over there. Peter’s not sure, but he _thinks_ she’s supposed to be trying to asking him what’s wrong.

“Uh, all fine,” says Peter absently, deliberately ignoring Gamora’s failed attempts at telepathy and looking back up at their beleaguered history teacher. “Can I, uh, go to the bathroom?”

Mr. Dey looks at him for a long moment before sighing loudly through his mouth.

Peter grabs the chewed pencil from the floor, and haphazardly palms a wad of sticky notes hanging out of a classmate’s pencil case on his way out the classroom door. He makes it down the hallway in record time, worn soles of his shoes slipping over the floor tiles as he slides into the sticky bathroom headfirst and almost falls into one of the urinals. It’s first period, middle of class, and the second floor bathroom is gross enough that almost no one ever uses it. Peter pulls the crumpled sticky notes out of his back pocket and sticks the pencil between his teeth, ready to pull the notes apart and write all his terrible options up on the mirror before he goes nuts from the stress.

Or someone dies.

Someone dying has gotta just happen in the movies, right? Only, Peter can distinctly remember thinking the same thing last year, when the mess with _his_ evil dad happened, and, so: sticky notes it is, to prevent insanity and-or death, and he deliberately avoids the fact that sticky notes on a bathroom wall for mental organization is a very Gamora thing to do.

Fitting, because Peter’s still determinedly straightening out the sticky note wad when Gamora bursts in through the bathroom door.

“Ah!” yells Peter.

“Ahh!” yells Gamora.

It takes a moment for them to collect themselves.

“What --” Peter stumbles back a few steps such that his butt hits the sink and holds his stolen sticky notes protectively against his chest. “Gamora!” He splutters for a second, before managing, “This is a _boys’ bathroom_.”

Which is an absolutely terrible argument, Peter knows, but Gamora says, “ _Oh my God_ ,” in this weird whisper shout like she’s actually worried someone will hear her in the deserted second floor boys’ bathroom. Then she remembers herself.

“I’m _not_ \--” She takes a deep breath, glaring -- “it doesn’t matter! What is _up_ with you, Peter?”

“Up?” says Peter. “Nothing is up! I’m -- a guy can’t take a whiz anymore?”

Instinctively, Peter has also started intensely whispering.

So they’re both a pair of idiots, whisper-shouting in the second floor boys’ bathroom while _death_ might be imminent. Peter’s not sure yet, because very rudely, Gamora interrupted his genius sticky note tactical planning session.

“No --” says Gamora. “I mean -- yes!”

“Okay, well, thank you for givin’ me permission, I’m gonna --”

“Argh -- you keep _acting_ weird!” says Gamora, cutting him off, pointing an accusatory finger at him. Her pretty hair is falling out of its ponytail a little bit and for the first time in two days, Peter looks at her and realizes that she looks genuinely upset. He swallows, tightly, and crumples his fist around the sticky notes, ruining all of his hard work.

“I am not acting weird!” he says, annoyed at how strained his voice suddenly is. “It’s just -- a weird situation!”

Something in Gamora’s shoulders seems to tighten even more, if that’s even possible. Her eyes widen a little bit, and her eyebrows pinch up, in a way that makes her ears look like they’re sticking out even more than usual.

“Are --” She seems to have a moment of difficulty forming the sentence, her eyes closing for a brief moment like she’s preparing herself for some big scary thing. “Are you avoiding me because of my -- because of what’s going on?”

“What?” says Peter, confused, still backed up against the toilet. For some reason, his eyes don’t want to look at her properly, so instead he looks at the wonky weiner someone has drawn on the cracked bathroom mirror in Sharpie. “No, that’s not --”

“Do you not trust me anymore?” asks Gamora, almost insistent, like she’s trying to prove something to herself, and Peter stares at her.

He does not squawk. He _doesn’t_.

“ _What_?” Peter squawks. “No!”

“Then what is _up_ with you?” demands Gamora, still hissing, though her shoulders and voice wobble just slightly like she’s suddenly relieved. For some reason, this makes Peter’s stomach twist itself up into knots even worse than before. “You’ve been avoiding me for like, two days now --”

“ _Nothing’s_ going on!” says Peter, his voice getting more strained by the second in the effort to continue whisper-shouting. The ceramic of the urinal is weird and cold against his butt.

“We’re supposed to be best friends! You’re supposed to tell me when something’s wrong!” whisper-shouts Gamora, her small fists trembling.

“I know!” It’s not a yell -- he’s sort of just gone back to talking in his normal voice, which sounds overly-loud in comparison to all the hissing -- but it happens so suddenly that Peter almost scares himself with it. “I know, okay! That’s what’s wrong! We’re supposed to be friends, we’re supposed to tell each other stuff, and you _never_ told me something was wrong!”

Gamora blinks at him, very rapidly, for like a whole ten seconds. Then she says,

“What are you talking about? I only just figured out --”

“ _No_ ,” says Peter, and it’s weird, kind of, how even after two days of ignoring his feelings they still bubbled up to the surface in this weird tangle of hurt and confusion and betrayal over something so stupid. “C’mon, Gamora, I’m not dumb. You clearly knew somethin’ was -- somethin’ was wrong --”

“I didn’t --”

“Why didn’t you tell me things were bad? I would’ve -- _we_ would’ve helped you, I -- I dunno, protected you guys or something --”

“It’s not like that,” says Gamora, a funny note in her voice, looking increasingly frustrated, “I was trying to -- I know some stuff that -- if you knew too, I didn’t know if --”

“Even if you didn’t know for sure, you still could’ve _told_ me you didn’t know for sure!” pushes Peter, swallowing hard against the knots that have traveled up from his stomach to lodge in his throat. “And you didn’t, and I dunno, it kinda feels sucky, ‘cause I thought we _did_ tell each other stuff so now I guess we don’t, but whatever, that’s fine! You just --”

“I was _trying_ to protect you,” Gamora yells, a weird angry note in her voice that an objective observer would guess might be directed at herself, but Peter interprets as directed towards him.

So he yells back, even though he doesn’t really mean to.

“Oh yeah? Last year? When Yondu didn’t tell me about my dad being an evil douchebag to _protect_ me? I almost got Yondu killed, and all of you hurt!”

“That’s different!” Gamora yells, unphased, back in that odd insistent voice like she’s trying to prove something, but Peter doesn’t stop even though even he’s not sure where all this is coming from, anyway.

It sort of feels like the world is ending again when he says,

“Last time someone didn’t tell me something to protect me it was about my mom _dying_ , Gamora!”

Silence.

Gamora looks like she’s been shocked by a live wire, one of the ones that are always hanging out of places they shouldn’t be in Yondu’s shop. Peter sucks in a big, trembly sort of breath.

“An -- And I’d really -- I got scared that something was gonna happen to you,” he continues, the words coming out all mumbled and confused like when he’d used to accidentally fast forward a tape in his mom’s Walkman. He doesn’t realize that his cheeks are all gross and wet until after a moment of them starting at each other, Gamora’s eyes way too wide for comfort. Peter feels his neck and cheeks flush with embarrassment -- he’s never embarrassed to cry around her, and something about feeling this way right now makes everything even worse -- and he stares deliberately at the floor as he wipes angrily at his wet face with his sleeve.

When he looks up again, Gamora’s face looks tight, and her eyebrow is twitching like she’s fighting with her own facial expression.

“I --” She’s cut off by the loud noise of the bell ringing, and the immediately following kerfuffle that comes from the hall as everyone and their grandmother run to escape the stuff classrooms that smell like old cheese. Gamora pinches her face and takes a deep breath, opening her mouth like she’s going to try again, only for the bathroom door to bang open again. The sounds of the hall’s chaos fill the cramped bathroom as some poor kid freezes in the doorway.

“Oh, jeez guys, I didn’t --”

“Not now, Harold,” says Peter loudly, still staring at Gamora, half expecting her to start yelling again. The bathroom door swings shut again, muffling the clamour of the hallway once again.

For a third time, Gamora looks like she’s about to say something; this time, her own phone interrupts her, buzzing loudly in her back pocket. She startles, like she’d forgotten it was even there, and looks a little bit like she wants to punch something when she yanks it out of her pocket and snarls, “ _What_?” into the sleek black device like it’s personally offended her.

The scowl on her face slips away so suddenly that it makes Peter’s stomach drop a little, because instead of her looking relieved or happy or any other variation of not-upset, she looks -- _scared_.

Abruptly, he remembers the shady car.

“What?” she says again, pressing the phone closer to her ear, and the memory of the car is forcefully followed by reminders of the dilapidated wad of stolen sticky notes crumpled up in his hand, and all of his premonitions of doom. “What do you mean, he’s _outside_? What -- Nebula --!”

She pulls the phone away from her ear to jerk her head up and look at Peter, eyes wider now than they were before. From the phone held in her hand, the dial tone sounds. “Oh my God,” Gamora mumbles, before rushing forward and clambering up onto one of the cracked urinals.

“Woah, wait,” Peter manages to croak, as she cranes her neck to look through the tiny, dirty square window in the high corner of the bathroom wall. “Wait -- what, what’s going on --”

“He’s _here_ ,” Gamora says, sounding frantic. The sole of her boot is squeaking against the plumbing over the urinal and her knuckles are white where she’s gripping the sorry excuse for a window sill. Frowning, Peter reaches up to grab the other side of the sill, attempting to pull himself up onto the urinal with her to peer out the window.

“Who’s here,” says Peter, yelping as he nearly loses his balance and falls ass-first into the urinal beside them. Pushing himself back onto their tiny perch, he tries to crowd closer to also look out the window.

“Ow -- you’re stepping on my foot --”

“Well _you’re_ elbowing me --” Peter finally looks up, scowling, mouth hanging open, at the small square of the school parking lot that is visible to them through the bathroom window.

His foot nearly slips right off the urinal rim again.

“ _Oh my God_ ,” says Peter, clutching onto the window ledge. “That’s the car I saw last night!”

Gamora whips around to look at him so fast that the end of her ponytail nearly takes his eye out.

“ _What_?”

“That car! The big black one by the tree -- I saw it last night before we got in the car and I didn’t know if it was followin’ us or what but it looked shady --”

He stutters to a stop, because Gamora looks absolutely stricken, which is a phrase Peter suddenly remembers his mom liked to use. Absolutely stricken.

“That’s,” says Gamora, as though she’s announcing the end of the world, “ _His car_.”

Peter makes a funny squeaking noise.

For the record, says the one part of his brain that is not having a total meltdown: he _knew_ that car was shady.

They stare at each other with wide flying saucer eyes for another fifteen seconds before this time successfully achieving the previously attempted telepathic communication; as one, they both dash for the bathroom door and shoulder it open, nearly bulldozing over poor Harold, who is hovering outside the facilities and rocking slightly on his feet like he really has to pee.

They make it three hallways towards nowhere before Gamora grabs Peter’s arm and yanks him to a stop, as though suddenly realizing that they don’t have a plan.

“The others --”

“By the lockers probably,” Peter blurts out, mouth working solely on something that must be muscle memory. Gamora nods vigorously before yelling,

“I’ll get them, you get the car!” and dashing in the opposite direction, nearly knocking down three startled looking first years and the school music teacher, all of whom stare at Peter in confusion.

“Young man,” says Ms. Jemiah in her signature severe tone, “why aren’t you headed to class?”

“Um,” Peter manages, floundering for a second, “she’s -- big soccer game?”

And then he bolts down the hall.

**

Peter’s strongest memories of Gamora and Nebula’s father all involve one of two things: conflict, or school administration.

The conflict one is pretty straightforward. Aside from the whole Evil Mob Boss thing, the hulking figure to whom the poor soccer coach would always refer to as “Mr. Titan” was the constant source of background tension in anything from sports games to school lunches to the time of day Gamora and Nebula were allowed to stay out until. Thinking about it now, Peter can attribute roughly ninety percent of Gamora’s stubbornness and belligerence to the smothered desire to rebel against her overbearing father. The other ten percent can be labelled as a reaction to Nebula’s stubbornness and belligerence, which in turn, is, yes, attributed to the desire to rebel against their overbearing father.

The school administration one is a little more confusing, because, once again in retrospect, you would _think_ that the big scary leader of the mafia isn’t going to care about correctly signing his children out of the Office’s laminated, sticker-covered sign-in book, in which Peter himself is responsible for drawing at least two dicks over the duration of his school career.

Of course, this bizarre adherence to meaningless public school Rules is something that Peter clings to now as their only source of hope as he scrambles out the school’s front doors and takes the stone steps down two at a time.

Nova High School’s front parking is caught right in the middle of low and high income -- a clean, nicely maintained strip of pavement with yellow lines drawn neatly along the green grass facing the football field, with a well-manicured pathway leading out of the school property’s front gates and to the open road that stretches out for a hot five minutes before it hits Peter’s crappy neighborhood. Peter has spent the past four years of his life in transit through this parking lot, and so he likes to think that he knows it like the back of his hand -- the pylons lining the front sidewalk as a well-meaning safety precaution, for example, or the three speed bumps leading up to the stop sign that acts as a gateway to the outside world.  

The rusting old Land Rover that Yondu taught Peter stick on for his tenth birthday is sitting happily in the middle of the lot, like it always is.

The scary black car is a few parking spaces away.

This is objectively bad, yes -- but they also have School Administration on their side.

Which means they have roughly five minutes: the time it take for scary adoptive father, well-respected businessman, and evil mafia boss code-named Thanos to walk all the way up to the office and sign his name into the little brown book filled with 16-year-old illustrations of dicks.

 _Okay,_ Peter thinks, glancing at his phone, _four minutes._

Yondu never uses the dick book, which is kind of funny, Peter thinks, because he’d probably have a great appreciation for it. Unlike how he probably _won’t_ have a great appreciation for all of his wayward children skipping school mid-morning on a Monday. Or a great appreciation for the knowledge that the aforementioned children never told him that their friends’ father is an innocent-person-murdering villain.

_Three minutes._

Yondu has never much liked innocent-person-murdering villains who also happen to be fathers.

Of course, given how they’re all going to be skipping school from now until indefinitely forever, depending on whether or not there are hit orders placed on their heads -- that’s what mobsters do, right? -- Peter’s going to have to tell Yondu the truth. At least he’ll be at work until late tonight, so Peter has all the time in the world to come up with sufficient excuses defending his decision to be a dumbass.

_Two minutes._

It’s still going to suck, Peter thinks, yanking the car door open and clambering into the driver’s seat. His elbow slams uncomfortably into the steering wheel, and the car horn blares loudly, making him yelp. It’s going to suck _so much_ , he thinks, fumbling with the keys, and something about how mundane that sucking is keeps Peter’s steadily building panic -- _where are Gamora and the others?_ \-- in check, which is probably good for the health of everyone involved.

There’s a sudden loud smacking on the car window, and Peter nearly yells out loud and drops the keys.

It’s only Groot, his face pressed up against the glass. A second later, Gamora and Nebula have wrenched open the car doors and everyone is piling into the car, yelling loudly.

“We’re dead, we’re dying, we’re all gonna die!”

“We are _not_ gonna die!”

“Groot --!”

“You’re stepping on my head!”

“Seat belts, seat belts, seat bel --”

“We have _one minute_ ,” growls Nebula, “before he finishes writing in that stupid dick book --”

And then, through the rearview mirror, Peter sees it:

The school doors bursting open, and the hulking figure of Gamora’s adopted father appearing on the stone steps, flanked by his two bodyguards.

“Peter!” yells Gamora, snapping him to attention, “ _start the car!_ ”

Peter starts the car. As though reading the mood, and because Peter supposes that his life is destined to be a large cosmic joke, the radio blares to life.

“-- _my daddy was the family bassman, my mama was an engineer, and I was born one dark grey morn --”_

“They have seen us, you morons!”

To the sight of Thanos pointing at their car and yelling something out loud, Peter slams his foot on the gas.

“ _\-- they call me Baby Driver, and once upon a pair of wheels --_ ”

The car tires squeal as the trusty Land Rover jerks out of its parking spot and swivels around to face the school exit, and Peter grits his teeth and grips the steering wheel tightly. The miscellaneous grunts and yells of his seat-belt-less siblings and friends sound from the backseat as they’re thrown against the car’s worn upholstery. Peter hears someone laughing a little hysterically before he realizes that it’s _him_. He decides that for the sake of the sanity of all involved, he’s going to embrace this fact, and he fumbles with the gear shift before yanking the car into forward gear.

Simon and Garfunkel continues blasting in the background; with a second squeal of tires, the car shoots forward.

“Aaaaaaah!” screams the backseat.

“They’re gettin’ in the car!” hollers Rocket, whose face is pressed against the back windshield, while Gamora yells, “Swerve!” and Peter has to yank the wheel to avoid hitting a startled Mr. Dey, who looks like he’s grabbing his coat from his car.

“WE ARE SORRY!” yells Mantis out of the window, while Nebula makes an indistinct growling sound at the coupled screeching sound of tires behind them and loud honking of the horn as their adversaries pull out of the parking lot to speed after them.

“Mr. Dey has dropped his car keys!” declares Drax in delight, following this announcement with his loud booming laughter. The tunes coming out of the radio are ramping up in intensity, and Peter swears loudly as the edge of their bumper sends one of the pylons on the sidewalk flying, and the car careens over a speed bump.

“Shit!”

“Ow!”

“ _Oof_ \--”

“Aaargh!”

“Groot’s right, we’re all gonna die!” wails Rocket, as Peter steps on the gas, drives right past the stop sign, and swerves out onto the open road with the black sedan hot on their heels, all the while screaming at the top of his lungs.

“ _\-- they call me Baby Driver, and once upon a pair of wheels, I hit the road and then I’m gone, what’s my number, wonder how your engines feel!_ ”

Peter really has to agree, he thinks, as he nearly crashes into a little old lady in her Toyota trying to change lanes and the radio continues to blast cheerfully.

They’re probably all gonna die.

**

They don’t die, which is really saying something.

They do nearly drive into the garbage cans that Peter had to haul out to the curb that morning as they pull into Yondu’s driveway.

The car stops, and everyone takes a couple seconds to sit paralyzed with adrenaline and breathing hard, staring unseeing at the front of the garage. Peter, whose hands are still glued to the steering wheel, wonders how lame it would be if he threw up on himself.

He is _so_ going to lose his license.

“If the mob doesn’t kill us, Pete’s driving will,” grumbles Rocket finally, who is nearly upside down in his seat.

“Your feet are in my face,” Drax informs him, shoving said feet away from his mouth.

“At least we lost them,” offers Mantis, whose glasses are a little lopsided.

“Thank you, Mantis,” Peter -- whose limbs are still stubbornly attached to the car and refusing to move -- mutters mutinously, before Gamora reaches over and pinches him into action.

Oh, right, yeah. Mobsters. Hit order. Death.

Yelping, he scrambles to unbuckle his seatbelt and turn off the car.

“You did not lose them,” says Gamora, jumping out of the passenger door and pulling open the backseat. “You just broke more traffic laws -- quickly!” she adds, as the rest of the gang dog-piles onto the driveway.

“You did break more traffic laws,” says Mantis nervously, pulling at the ends of her pigtails nervously. “Will we go to jail?”

“No one’s going to jail,” says Peter in a panicked voice, nearly tripping over the front steps and grabbing Groot’s hand to hurry him along into the house. “Just get inside!”

“I would thrive in jail,” says Drax solemnly, and Rocket says,

“Oh yeah? I bet I could bust us out no problem, even if we _did_ get arrested.”

“No one’s getting arrested!” snaps Gamora. “We need to hide!”

“Basement?” says Peter, and Gamora nods and starts shoving everyone in the direction of the house.

They make it all the way to the kitchen without incident, until Peter pulls on the basement door and it swings open to the sight of Yondu standing there, arms crossed.

With great dignity, Peter yells out loud and jumps backwards.

He doesn’t _quite_ land in Gamora’s arms, but it’s a close thing.

“What in the _hell_ ,” says Yondu, “is goin’ on.”

He looks like he only just got to the top of the basement stairs, which, were Peter in a slightly less distressed state of mind, would alert him to the fact that Yondu’s probably got a haul of parts that he’s been sorting through in the unofficial workshop that’s cobbled together downstairs, prepping them to take to the shop later. He’s not fully dressed, so clearly this was a planned event, and the landline held firmly between the cracking skin of his right hand fingers makes Peter’s stomach sink to his toes.

Despite all of this, Peter still yelps, “Why aren’t you at work!” his voice cracking once again with great dignity.

“Who gives a damn’s worth where I am!” yells Yondu. Behind him, Peter can feel the others wince. He’s been taller than Yondu for some months now, but he still feels small, smaller than he has throughout this entire ordeal, and his heart rate is going fast and terrified at the thought of what’s still hot on their heels.

“Now,” says Yondu, sounding like he does whenever he’s about to call them out spectacularly on some new bullshit. This is an art that he’s perfected, Peter knows. “I’m sittin’ in our pretty li’l basement, mindin’ my own damn business -- never once axed you to e’splain your fool behaviour from last night, either -- and who decides to drop a nice ole phone call down here than your firs’ period teacher! Man says you nearly ran him over with your damn fool reckless drivin’ in the middle of the school day?”

“Yondu --”

“Don’t you _Yondu_ me, Quill! I don’t bust my ass to get ya’ll an educatin’ so you can near kill folk as you skip school, so if you don’t explain yourself in sixty seconds, boy, I will beat your ass so hard that you w --”

“My father is a dangerous criminal who is trying to kill us!” blurts out Gamora, loudly, and then grimaces, almost comically, awaiting the response. Peter sways a little on the spot, still staring at Yondu with wide, pleading eyes, who has for the first time since Peter’s known him been rendered utterly silent in the middle of a blustery tirade.

Yondu opens his mouth, showing off all of his broken up teeth, and then closes it.

For a moment, it feels like time has stood still. The unnatural quiet of their little house surrounds them, as the truth of this statement sinks in. Yondu blinks a few times and continues to stare at Gamora; Gamora keeps on grimacing, but holds his gaze rather than looking away.

And then, from the front of the house comes the sound of tires screeching to a halt. Peter feels his eyes bug out; beside him, Gamora’s face has drained of all colour, as though somehow she had forgotten that amidst the chaos they were still being followed by her father. There is a moment, a half second, where Peter locks eyes with Yondu desperately.

Outside, the car doors slam shut, and Yondu goes utterly still.

“Get in the kitchen, now,” he says, in a quiet, careful voice.

“Yondu --”

There’s a knock on the door, loud and deliberate and enough to make Peter and Gamora jump.

“I said get. Quickly -- quietly now, don’t anyone make a sound or I _will_ kick yer asses myself.”

Peter watches silently around the corner as Yondu pushes past them, dirty work boots clunking against the floor as he crosses the hall to the living room and tugs the couch forward with a loud scraping noise. Reaching in the crack behind it, he pulls out his shotgun and lifts it up quietly, cocking it before setting it against the wall by the front hallway, close to the door.

“ _Peter_ ,” hisses Gamora from around the kitchen wall.

Starting, Peter scrambles back into the kitchen and far down the room to where the fridge is, pressing himself up against the cabinets beside Gamora and Mantis. On the other side of the cabinet, Groot has wedged himself between the countertop and the fridge, and Rocket is hiding behind a chair. Drax is trying his best to look small; Mantis has started chewing on her nails.

So quietly that Peter can hear them all breathing, they listen as Yondu opens the front door. It creaks on its hinges, like it always does.

“Howdy,” comes Yondu’s friendly voice, the one he uses on particularly tricky customers at the shop.

There’s an indisctinct sound, like someone talking, but Peter can’t make out what’s said. And then Yondu says,

“There a reason why y’all are knockin’ down my door in the middle of the day with no prior warnin’?”

“I’m looking for my daughter.”

It’s like all the air gets sucked out the the room.

Nebula makes a faint, indecipherable noise. On the other side of the counter, Peter nearly jumps; Gamora’s hand has shot out to grab his bicep of its own accord, her fingers digging into his arm so hard they’re almost bruising. Her grip is twitchy, like she’s trying to hold herself back from trembling. Mantis makes a faint, extremely quiet moaning noise and tugs at her green tank top, trying to push Rocket’s hand away from where he’s twisted the rainbow-patterned hem of her shorts between his poky little fingers.

“Huh,” says Yondu, “ain’t she in school? Best try there firs’.”

Peter remembers Thanos’s voice from soccer games gone bad and the occasional phone call put on speakerphone, but something about it up close and just around the corner makes his fingers go cold. It’s booming without being loud, threatening without being angry. It’s deep and quiet and gets under his skin immediately, and it somehow carries all the way down the hall into the kitchen so that every word is loud and clear to their ears like he’s right here in the room with them.

“I know that she’s here,” comes Thanos’s voice, and Peter looks over to see Gamora squeeze her eyes shut, her lips pressed into a thin, shaky line. A strand of her hair is sticking to her cheek.

“You’d think I’d be aware of a lil girly in my own damn house, wouldn’tcha.”

“Where is my daughter?” asks Thanos again, an odd, mild note creeping into his tone. Peter feels himself hold his breath without meaning to, his fingers subconsciously curling around the cabinet handle behind him for support.

“I _said_ , hell if I know, pally. Now, if you’n your boys’d kindly get off my front porch --”

“I won’t ask again.”

“‘S this a negotiation, now?”

“I suppose you think your blustery attempts at being menacing are useful here, Udonta,” comes Thanos’s voice; Yondu makes an odd sound, and Peter realizes with a sinking feeling that he hadn’t expected that Thanos would know him by name. “The attempt is good, I suppose.”

“Well now,” comes Yondu’s voice, still in his easy, friendly tone. “I live a simple life, me, you know, so when I got a couple crazy folk trespassin’ on my private property I don’t take it upon meself to call any cops or nothin’. Oh, no, see, I jus’ shoot ‘em myself.”

There’s a long moment of silence, and a faint shuffling noise. Peter can hear Groot, breathing through his mouth.

“Don’t kid yourself into thinking that this is over.”

“Uh huh. You hurry along now. Hope you find your girly alright, ‘cause ain’t it a bitch to misplace your own damn kid!” The door slams, and Peter hears Yondu’s final, muffled, “ _Jackass_ ,” before there are loud footsteps down the hallway and their foster father appears in the kitchen doorway.

Before anyone can say anything Yondu has a finger to his lips, his other hand palm up in the air to keep them still. There’s the sound of car doors slamming again, and the swell of the engine as they finally drive away.

Silence. From outside the kitchen window, Peter can hear the faint noise of birds chirping. Yondu stares at them for a moment, long and hard: pale and trembling and all clutching each other, Gamora’s fingers still digging painfully into Peter’s shoulder.

“Fuckin’ hell,” says Yondu finally, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Let’s siddown so y’all can explain what all this’s about.”

**

“Krags, get the foam thing from upstairs, willya -- the shit you put under a mattress, you know what I mean.”

“It is rolled up into a long tube,” says Mantis helpfully, slipping off of her perch on the couch such that her pigtails bounce, so she can direct Kraglin in his task. “I will show you.”

Kraglin shrugs and salutes, as he has been doing most of the afternoon after Yondu called him to come and keep an eye on them while he went to tie some things up at the shop. That’s how it played out: they explained what was going on, Yondu miraculously believed them, Yondu went off to do God knows what, and Yondu came home to decide What To Do.

Peter’s always known Yondu’s a perceptive bastard, emotionally constipated though he might be, and so it made sense that it didn’t take much other than the girls carefully and with only a slightly tremble to their voices explaining what they knew for Yondu to purse his lips, bare his teeth and then declare firmly that they should help themselves to anything not molding in the fridge.

He hasn’t said much other than that, besides giving Peter a long, weird look that made Peter shift in place far more than he liked. Since the imminent threat of Bad Guys had passed, Peter was increasingly nervous about all of his poor decision making: lying to Yondu, getting mad at Gamora, hauling everyone on a wild goose chase when they should have really told an adult from the get go. He let his emotions tell him what to do, just like he’d done last year, but this time things were way more complicated and it wasn’t just Peter in harm’s way.

Yondu didn’t call him out, though, and only had Kraglin make them hot chocolate with the ancient packets stowed above the oven before he left for the shop. Now he’s back home, looking like he knows more than he’s letting on and bullying Kraglin into bringing down mattresses from the attic.

It’s been a wild couple of days, Peter has to admit.

The group of them have piled onto the groaning old couch in the living room behind which the shotgun used to reside -- it’s still resting happily right by the door -- nursing their half-finished hot chocolates and staring at Yondu like they’re awaiting orders, or something.

“‘S probably best y’all stay here for the night,” says Yondu, scratching at his chin. “Don’t know what’s safe otherwise. Pete, you c’n help Kraglin bring the shit down from upstairs. And Drax, you’d best go call your mama, let her know where you are. But no one leaves this house ‘til we figure some things out, y’hear?”

“Kraglin can bring the stuff down on his own,” protests Peter, who can still feel Gamora’s arm trembling where it’s pressed against his.

“What’re we figuring out?” asks Rocket, who is fiddling with another bundle of electrical wires, wedged between Groot and Peter on the couch.

“Do you know something that we don’t?” says Nebula, scowling.

“Are we going to go to school tomorrow?” asks Mantis quietly, raising her hand like she’s in class.

“No,” growls Yondu, pinching the bridge of his nose again and looking severe. “I _said_ , no one leaves this house ‘til it’s safe. I don’t know much ‘bout your daddy, but he ain’t a walk in the park. You stay in this house, you listen to me an’ Kraglin, an’ that’s final. Understood?”

There’s an awkward, mutinous silence, where everyone shifts a little where they’re squished up against each other.

“Yes, _captain_ ,” mutters Rocket, not looking up. Kraglin snickers slightly under his breath.

“What was that?” snaps Yondu, one hairless eyebrow raised threateningly. Rocket straightens a little in his seat, and Kraglin quickly schools his expression into one of utter solemnity.

“Yes, sir,” they all chorus.

“Y’all best keep in line,” adds Kraglin, nodding firmly. Yondu rolls his eyes.

“Won’t have no damn fool kids gettin’ hurt under my roof,” he says, voice rough and grumbly. Then he clears his throat, looking uncomfortable. “Go -- finish your damn drinks, or somethin’. An’ go downstairs, don’t look so scared!”

They scramble off the couch, un-wedging themselves. Peter nearly face-plants into the carpeted floor as Rocket and Groot catapult themselves towards the basement to call dibs on the best sleeping bags. He makes it halfway to the basement door, sock-clad feet sliding over the scratched laminate floors, before Yondu’s grabbed his arm and steered him back into the kitchen.

“Yondu --”

“You alright, boy?”

“Wha’?” Peter blinks, several times, before looking up at Yondu’s loosely crossed arms and decidedly un-severe look. Given the fact that Peter thought he was about to be thoroughly chastised for lying _and_ pulling dumbass stunts, he stands there with his mouth hanging open like an idiot for a solid five seconds.

Yondu raises his eyes to the heavens as though asking for patience.

“I _said_ \--”

“I’m sorry for lying!” Peter blurts out, grimacing. “And I didn’t mean -- we were _gonna_ tell you, or, or the cops or somethin’, but we didn’t have any proof and the kids were real scared so --”

“Pete. You’re talkin’ yourself outta air again.”

“R-right,” manages Peter, making another face. “I’m --”

“It’s okay, son, I already talked to Gamora,” Yondu interrupts him smoothly, sighing loudly and closing his eyes before rolling them. “C’mere. She told me why they ain’t said nothin’ sooner. Nobody blames y’all.”

Peter blinks at him again, some of the tension that’s been hanging out in his shoulders fading away a little for the first time in two days. He takes a step forward. “Really?”

“Now what I wanna know is,” says Yondu, drawing out the words slowly, “ _you_ holdin’ up okay?”

“You talked to Gamora?”

Yondu makes a frustrated sound, as though annoyed what’s proving to be an attempt at a comforting interaction is getting dragged out longer than he meant it to be.

“Jus’ answer the damn question, boy --”

“Um -- yeah, I’m um. I’m good, Yondu.” Peter takes a deep breath, squaring his shoulders. “I’m okay. Honest.” Yondu tilts his head, eyes narrowing very slightly, before he makes a gruff noise and nods, clearing his throat.

“Good. Good. Well -- the kids all bounce back real quick, but you always -- get stuck in your own --” He clears his throat for the second time, this one louder than before. “Get on downstairs, then,” he says loudly. “I gotta make a call.”

“Uh huh.”

He nods one final time, pushing off the table and pressing one calloused hand against the side of Peter’s head before he makes his way out of the kitchen, leaving Peter standing there a little stupidly with a cold mug of hot chocolate in his hands.

**

Two hours later, Peter’s back is pressed up against the basement wall, shoulders wrapped loosely in his grandfather’s old sleeping bag.

He’s exhausted, but he’s having a hard time sleeping. The cracked little mp3 player that Yondu gave him last year is tucked in his lap, one earbud stuffed loosely in his ear as David Bowie plays. It’s not quite drowning out the sound of Drax’s snoring from the opposite end of the room, because for some reason Peter’s fingers don’t want to cooperate and turn the volume of the Zune any higher. It’s weird, kind of. They haven’t had a sleepover like this in years, not since the summer before grade nine, and even though he should be excited about it, he’s -- weirdly nervous, like he’s gonna do something to mess it up. It feels like everything that happened earlier, all the danger, is over, now -- like none of it was nearly as scary as it felt when it happened.

It’s messing with his head, just a little. Did he imagine the whole thing?

There’s a shuffling noise beside him and Peter looks up, startled, to see Gamora standing there in the dark. She has her own sleeping bag wrapped around herself like a cape, and her eyes are wide in the dark. Peter tugs his earbud out and blinks up at her; the basement has one single, tiny window up in the corner by the ceiling, and moonlight is filtering through into the room, making everything light up in odd places. A little to Peter’s left, the wall transitions into the old wooden staircase that leads back upstairs, and he can see the yellow light of the living room filtering in from under the closed door, along with the muffled sound of the television set, and the occasional sound of footsteps.

“Hi,” whispers Gamora.

“Hi,” Peter whispers back.

She takes a deep breath, and tugs her sleeping bag cape more tightly around her shoulders. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“Me neither,” says Peter.

Gamora nods, biting her lip, and then after a moment turns and sits down beside him, back against the wall. The sleeping bags make faint scratchy noises where the polyester rubs against itself and Peter can hear the zipper of her bag hit the wood floor when she reaches the ground. She took out her ponytail, probably around the same time she changed into a spare pair of Mantis’s pajamas, the ones with the plastic sequin frog on the front. Her loose hair hangs kind of messy around her face. They sit in silence for a little bit, staring out over the storage boxes in front of them to across the room where the others are spread out over the floor. Drax’s blanket is barely big enough to cover him but he seems content; Rocket’s crawled into an upturned laundry basket and is mumbling in his sleep; Groot’s hugging an old stuffed toy that definitely used to belong to Peter; and Mantis and Nebula are squeezed into one sleeping bag, pressed up against the far wall under the window.

Gamora pulls her knees up to her chest, hugging them to herself. When Peter turns to look at her she’s already staring at him, a weird, complicated look on her face. It reminds him of a time when they hadn’t been friends for very long, and she couldn’t understand why he cared about his old music so much until he explained it to her. They’re safe now, Yondu upstairs and Thanos somewhere not close, but she still looks nervous.

“I --”

“It’s okay,” Peter hears himself say, quietly. Gamora blinks at him a couple times, her eyelashes looking really long in the shadows even though she’s frowning. Up close, her big eyes and loose hair is filling his stomach up with butterflies, so Peter looks down at his fingers, stretching them out against the worn edges of the Zune, and chews on his lips. He looks back up. “Um. Friends again?”

There’s a moment of silence before Gamora says, “Okay,” in a small voice. The Zune looks kind of purple in the weird lighting, Peter thinks, even though usually it’s orange. And he’s glad they’re all safe, Gamora especially, and that’s probably more important than his weird and confusing feelings, anyway, because she’s still his best friend. She probably always will be.

“Can I put my head on your shoulder?” Gamora asks, still in that tiny quiet voice. Peter glances over at her, his elbows curling a little under his slipping sleeping bag, and he nods. Lips pressed together, Gamora nods back, before shuffling a little closer and re-positioning her head. Her hair’s kind of ticklish, Peter thinks, his arm tensing for barely a second before it eases up again. He’s pretty sure they’ve never done this before, but it feels kind of nice. Gamora and her sleeping bag are pretty cozy to be pressed up against.

They fall asleep like that, backs up against the wall, close together.

**

Breakfast is pretty loud, like it usually is, almost like everything that happened yesterday was all a big bad dream. Yondu refuses point blank to make pancakes -- his back’s not what it used to be and _he_ ain’t digging around for no recipe -- but he sets out all the different cereals they have and only yells at Peter once to turn off the old tape player, which Peter refuses to do.

“It’s setting the _mood,_ ” Peter says, cradling the device in his arms and holding it away from Yondu’s scowl like it’s his baby. “We can’t be having a good time without good music!”

“‘Least turn it to somethin’ good, boy,” Yondu grumbles, as Kraglin shuffles around the kitchen and helps himself to what looks like half their stash of coffee. Rocket and Nebula are bickering over the last helping of Honey Nut Cheerios and Drax has a milk mustache and is laughing loudly. Gamora has been smiling all morning, which is markedly different from the past two days and kind of makes Peter feel like everything is gonna be just alright.

“I like _Hotel California_!” announces Mantis happily, as she bounces in her seat listening to the crackling of her rice puffs.

“ _Thank_ you,” says Peter, grinning and reaching over to steal a single Cheerio from Rocket’s bowl. Rocket flicks the next one in his eye, and Peter yelps.  

The fact that they don’t have to go to school is definitely contributing to the good mood, Peter thinks, rubbing at his eye.

“It’s kinda pretty soundin’,” Kraglin muses, slurping his coffee.

“Put on some Bowie!”

“No, no -- do the happy one about the blue man!”

“He ain’t takin’ requests, now sit down ‘n eat your --”

The doorbell rings.

The loud clamour around the kitchen table dies down as one, and everyone looks at Yondu until he says,

“Well, ‘sprob’ly just the mail or somethin’. No, c’mon -- stay here, eat your cereal,” he adds, pointing at Groot -- who is also sporting an impressive milk mustache -- before he stands, seat scraping against the floor.

The doorbell rings again and Yondu grits his teeth.

“I tol’ you to turn that damn racket off, boy,” he says, before he and his clunky boots head down the hall. Extracting his long limbs from his seat, Peter scrambles to his feat, tape player still under arm but clicked _off_ , and trails after Yondu to the front door, clad in his boxers and a ratty old band t-shirt. Yondu usually needs a mediator to be there when interacting with the mailman, Peter knows, after the great pizza coupon incident of grade six.

Muttering to himself, Yondu undoes the lock and pulls open the door.

Peter, sock-covered feet padding on the hallway floor, pauses and frowns. The uniformed man at the door clears his throat. “Are you Yondu Udonta?” he asks.

From the kitchen, Peter can hear his siblings’ renewed bickering, and Kraglin’s nasally laughter.

“Yeah,” says Yondu, scowling. “What --”

“And this is your family residence?”

“Who in the hell’re you?” says Yondu, baring his teeth, but the man doesn’t budge. Peter watches, mouth open, as he holds up his badge.

“Mr. Udonta,” says the police officer standing at the door. “I’m going to have to ask you to come with me. You’re under arrest.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> im convinced infinity war would not have been as sad were yondu still alive
> 
> also, the only way to truly Experience the car chase scene is to start blasting simon and garfunkel's baby driver right as it starts playing in the fic and pretend you're watching a Whacky Movie Action Sequence
> 
> finally, i know a lot of u have been asking for more details re: The Year Of The Devil -- which, we WILL get some more allusions to vol2 before this fic is up, i promise -- but i really have to admit that any mystery surrounding the name The Devil is from me thinking of that one scene in brooklyn nine nine where jake turns to his dad and says "your move, white devil" whenever i watch vol2
> 
> sorry for it being so underwhelming, gang
> 
> hopefully chapter four -- the FINAL CHAPTER!!!! -- will be here soon!

**Author's Note:**

> 1) the premise of this fic was inspired by judypoovey's "we're jerry springer, not casablanca" here on ao3, which is an ABSOLUTE DELIGHT and i highly recommend you read it
> 
> 2) chronologically, i've mashed up some of the canon plot events and also made it such that yondu isnt dead (who needs death anyway) but the bare bones of it are that ego Happened in some liminal past space and ronan was but a middle school blip on the radar. 
> 
> 3) if u didnt pick up on it from whatever this mess is, peter and gamora and drax are 17; nebula and mantis are 15; rocket is 14; and groot is 12
> 
> 4) this occurs in some unidentified and mythic American Place where these weird names and this weird mix of Really Rich and Kind of Poor can all attend the same school. suspension of disbelief, anyone?
> 
> 5) i promise the next chapter will be more action-packed and have more REAL cute starmora moments, and be less about peter just internal monologuing about telling his best friend he like-likes her. i'll also probably dig more deeply into their at-home family dynamic and their relationship with yondu and their teachers at school. so far school is only referenced in passing, i KNOW, but i promise the high-school-ish-ness of this high school au will be a lot more present in part two -- as will kraglin!
> 
> 6) that being said, these kids are a bunch of loser nerds, so it's not really all that surprising that they spend all their time outside of class hanging out together in an abandoned playground and watching old classic films
> 
> hope u enjoyed!


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